Template:Search - 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.