Gmail’s “sort not search” philospohy changed the way many of us use email, but limit of 20 results per page is irritating to many. Here’s how you can fix the limit with a bookmarklet.

When I search for ‘from:ted’ in my inbox, the url that my browser shows is this one:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/from%3Ated

And it shows these emails:

There’s space for more emails, so why can’t I see them? Irritating, huh?

We’re not alone. Googling ‘Gmail more than 20 results’ gets you a lot of angry users who are mostly now complaining that they’ve complained about this since 2009 and Gmail hasn’t helped.

Here’s my solution (I found the technical part of this on this stackexchange question).

If, I change the url to:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#section_query/from%3Ated

Then I get to see all 33 (not 28 that the previous page claimed) of the emails:

This is a nice easy little hack to show up to 100 threads in the search results. If you have more than 100 threads, then the normal ‘<‘ and ‘>’ buttons work well.

It’s a bit of a pain to keep changing the url, so I wrote a little bookmarklet to do the job (using the Bookmarklet Crunchinator).

To start using the bookmarket, make sure you can see your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. Then, drag and drop the bookmarklet link below to your bookmarks toolbar. When you’re on a page where you want to use the bookmarklet just click its name on your toolbar. (or, if you are like me and hide the toolbar, just click it in the bookmarks menu.

BetterGmailSearch

EDIT –

Some people on Lifehacker (which picked up the article) found that they were getting 50 messages in the search results, rather than 100). It turns out that this method won’t return more search results than fit in your inbox. For example, I have this setting in my gmail settings.

This means that (normally) I get to see up to a 100 messages in my inbox, but still only 20 in my search pane. When I use the URL hack in this article, I get to see 100 emails in my search pane.

On the other hand – if I set that setting to ’50’, then I would normally see up to 50 messages in my inbox and 20 in the search pane – but the URL hack will let me see 50 in the search pane.

SECOND EDIT –

For those illustrated, this is a wonderful example of the drawbacks of StackExchange’s voting method. On the relevant question, the answer that says “No, there’s still no way to do that.” has 10 early votes putting it as the top answer, while the (two) answers that show easy ways of doing it, both languish at the bottom with two votes each (presumably from each other).

THIRD EDIT:

(with thanks to the person who emailed in)

This doesn’t work if you used gmail’s advanced search, which looks like this:

because advanced search, for some reason, doesn’t use the same url structure. The workaround is as follows: