Chapter V. Full text search

By default, the bodies of messages and certain attachments are indexed to enable fast word searches through the entire database. This global search is invoked from the search toolbar:

Search box

When hitting the Enter key or pressing the Find button, all messages that match the search terms are retrieved and displayed in a new results page. Also the searched words are highlighted on screen within the body of messages, until the user clears the search box input field.

The search is case insensitive and will ignore words containing only one or two characters, or more than 50, or that are declared as stopwords in the database. Email addresses can be searched directly, by typing them in full or in part (domain name or part of domain-name, first name, lastname) Compound words can be search in full or by one of their components, if longer than two characters.

Searching for exact sentences including space or punctuation is done by enclosing the sentence inside double-quotes. See also the substring search capabilities of the Query command (Selection->New Query).

Accents can be ignored in search in order to find words whose accents or diacritic marks may lack or differ across messages. This behavior can be controlled with the "Accents & diacritics marks" setting from the Preferences Search tab. A specific search can always override this choice by including the dedicated operator: accents:insensitive in the search expression, or its abbreviation accents:i. Conversely, an exact match on accents can be required by specifying accents:sensitive or the shorter equivalent accents:s. The unaccented search feature also depends on the full-text indexer settings (see Section XIV.1, “Server's configuration”), but it is enabled by default.

Results can also be filtered out by specifying words that must not appear in the searched messages. To exclude a word from the search, a minus sign (dash) is added before that word. Example: tennis mary -pierce will retrieve messages that contain the words tennis and mary and do not contain pierce.