You might not know exactly what you're looking for, but sometimes you're pretty clear about what you don't want. The hyphen is for those times when your search results are hopelessly cluttered with messages that are close to what you're looking for, but not close enough. So when your from:steve search comes back totally jam-packed with e-mail about your Facebook Scrabble games, try from:steve -scrabble to clear things up a little.

These are, of course, only a few of the Gmail search operators you can use. For a complete list, visit the .