Template:Search

Searching for Word Fragments

To display all emails containing a word with a particular fragment, use the wildcard character (*). For example:

auto*

will return emails with auto, automatic, automobile etc.

*example.com

will return emails with all email addresses and domains of example.com.

firstname.lastname*

will return emails with all email addresses of firstname.lastname.

Searching for Words with unknown letters

To view all emails containing a word where you do not know how to spell it correctly, you can use the question mark (?). For example

Me?er

would find emails with Meier and Meyer, but not Maier.

The question mark (?) cannot be used at the beginning of a word or at the end of a word, use the wildcard character (*) instead.

Searching for Phrases

To search for words appearing consecutively and in a specific order, use quotation marks (""). For example:

"Microsoft Windows"

will return the text Microsoft Windows but not Microsoft Works or Windows 95.

Phrases cannot contain the wildcard characters (?) and (*).

Narrowing by Fields

A search for keywords or phrases can be limited to specific fields. For example:

subject:News                  only in Subject
from:[email protected]         only in From
to:[email protected]        only in To
cc:[email protected]           only in Cc
bcc:[email protected]     only in Bcc
bcontent:billing              only in Body of message
acontent:billing              only in Attachments of message

Searching for Alternatives

Use square brackets [] to search for alternative words. Example:

[Support Request Form]

finds emails that contain the word support or the word request or the word form or any combination of these.

[from:[email protected] subject:important "very important"]

finds emails that come from [email protected] or have the word important in the subject or contain the phrase very important anywhere in the email.

Excluding Words

To narrow a search, you may want to specify words which must not be present in the emails. To exclude words from the search results, prepend the word with the minus character (-). For example:

ZDNet -download-tip

returns all emails from ZDNet which do not contain download-tip.

ZDNet -download-tip -"free gift"

returns all emails from ZDNet which do not contain download-tip and do not contain the phrase free gift.

Exclusions cannot be used in alternatives, so

[Microsoft Windows -Powerpoint]

is not valid, but

[Microsoft Windows] -Powerpoint

is valid and will find emails that contain Microsoft or Windows but not the word Powerpoint.

Valid is also

-[Microsoft Windows Powerpoint]

which returns all emails that do not contain any of the words Microsoft, Windows or Powerpoint.

Combining Search Options

Any of the search options described above can be combined. For example:

ZDNET -"Daily Update"

returns all emails from ZDNet which do not contain the consecutive words Daily Update.

from:ZDNET bcontent:ACME

returns all emails from ZDNET which have ACME somewhere in their message body.

from:[email protected] acontent:bill

returns all emails from [email protected] which have bill in any attachment.

to:[email protected] -sales

returns all emails to [email protected] which do not have sales in any part of the email.

[from:[email protected] from:[email protected]] acontent:Invoice -subject:Reminder

finds all emails from [email protected] or [email protected] that have Invoice in an attachment but no Reminder in the subject.

[from:[email protected] from:[email protected]] [bill admonition] -[to:[email protected] cc:[email protected] bcc:[email protected]]

returns all emails from [email protected] or [email protected] that do have bill or admonition anywhere and are not sent to [email protected].

from:[email protected] to:[email protected] acontent:bill -subject:admonition

returns all message from [email protected] to [email protected] which have bill in any attachment but do not have admonition in the subject.

About Special Characters

Words inside indexed emails or attachments which are a combination of alphanumeric (letters, digits) and non-alphanumeric characters (white space, line break, delimiter or other control characters), may be returned in search results when searching for the alphanumerical part only.

For instance, when searching for firstname, firstname.lastname and lastname, e-mails containing the word firstname.lastname will be returned.

Separators and control characters that cause this behavior:

• Period (.)
• Comma (,)
• Semicolon (;)
• Hyphen (-)
• Underscore (_)
• AT-Sign (@)
• Slash & Backslash (/,\)
• Null character (NUL)

When the original text was divided by a different character, e.g. firstname(lastname, then only the full term is present in the index and one has to know the full term or has to use the wildcard character (*) to find emails containing that text.

Special characters at the beginning and the end of text are stripped and not present in the search index. It cannot be searched for these characters.