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:john@example.com         only in From
to:michael@example.com        only in To
cc:lisa@example.com           only in Cc
bcc:customers@example.com     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:info@example.com subject:important "very important"]

finds emails that come from info@example.com 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:billing@example.com acontent:bill

returns all emails from billing@example.com which have bill in any attachment.

to:recruiting@example.com -sales

returns all emails to recruiting@example.com which do not have sales in any part of the email.

[from:billing@example.com from:accounting@example.com] acontent:Invoice -subject:Reminder

finds all emails from billing@example.com or accounting@example.com that have Invoice in an attachment but no Reminder in the subject.

[from:billing@example.com from:accounting@example.com] [bill admonition] -[to:test@example.com cc:test@example.com bcc:test@example.com]

returns all emails from billing@example.com or accounting@example.com that do have bill or admonition anywhere and are not sent to test@example.com.

from:billing@example.com to:myaddress@company.tld acontent:bill -subject:admonition

returns all message from billing@example.com to myaddress@company.tld 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.