Frequently Asked Questions

Email Fetching / How do I perform a search?

How do I perform a search?

The Search page allows you to find emails that have been stored on the Intradyn Email Archiver, based on the criteria you choose.

Many organizations give everyone access to the Intradyn Email Archiver.  Without special permission, they are only allowed to search and view their own email.  Since the Archiver stores all email, they do not have to take special steps to save important email, or even decide what is important.

Searching: A Simple Example

In this example Bob is looking for an email he received some time in the past, he doesn’t remember exactly when, about a time travel story he wrote.  He brings up the search screen and (because he can’t remember the date, but it was no earlier than last year) he fills in a few fields on the query.

Email_Archiving_search_1.png
He hits Search and reviews the results.

And there, towards the bottom is the Email he thinks he’s looking for.

Email_Archiving_search_2
Double clicking on it displays the mail. The search strings are highlighted on the display.

Email_Archiving_search_2

Search Filed Operators Explanation

The search field operators are the options that come before each search term on the Search page. The operators “contains one or more of”, “contains all of”, “contains none of” and “exact match” or some subset of these operators are used for all search fields except for “email date”. These operators alter the Boolean logic or phrasing of the search.

 

1. “Contains one or more” Search Filed Operator

In the above example there were 11 results from the search.

If Bob had looked at most of the other emails, he would NOT have found the phrase “time travel“.

That is because his search was set up to find any email with the words “time” or “travel”.  The reason is the search filed operator was “contains one or more“.

Email_Archiving_search_4
2. “Contains Exact Phrase” Search Field Operator
If he wanted to make sure that the exact phase was in the results, change the search field operator to “contains exact phrase“.
Email_Archiving_search_5 2
3. “Contains all of” Search Filed Operator
Another way to search for a phrase is by putting quotes around it.  This allows more complex searches.
This search will only find email that has both the phrase time travel and the term Wells.  
Email_Archiving_search_6

Using contains all of  is useful when you know approximately what was written, but not exactly.

The following search term would match email that contains

Email_Archiving_search_7

  • The big highway accident….
  • highway 33 accident …
  • the five car accident on highway 33…
  • ended up on highway 33 by accident…
Because it is not an exact phrase, the terms can be anywhere in the email.

 

Searching: Date Searches

When you bring up the Search screen, the Email Date Sent field defaults to Relative and past month.
Email_Archiving_search_8

This default is to let you find relatively recent emails.  However, it is not appropriate for every search.

For example, to see all the emails you received in the last 24 hours, you can change past monthto yesterday and run the search.

Or to see all the emails you’ve ever received, you can remove the Email Date Sent field all together by clicking on the red X to the left of the field to remove it.  This would apply to any further query terms.

For example, to see all correspondence with (both from them and from yourself)

Remove the Email Date Sent field, go to add search term and add Email From/To, and put the email in that field.

The reason to Email From/To rather than put the name in the Email To and Email From field is because these fields are “AND” together.

So that would only find emails that were sent by jwcampbell@astounding.com or to jwcampbell@astounding.com

Email_Archiving_search_9If you wanted to find all the email sent to you on a specific day, you can use the on criteria of the Email Date Sent field.
Email_Archiving_search_10

Administrators can get all the correspondence between two email accounts by using the field Email From/To, the condition contains all of and the two addresses in the field and eliminating the Email Date Sent (to get get all of the email, regardless of when sent).  Because the condition contains all of, the results must have both email addresses, either in the To: or in the From: fields.

To illustrate looking within a date range, this example uses the between condition.  It allows you to pick a start date and an end date for the search (in this case, May 1, 2016 and ending on July 31, 2016).  Other conditions on the Email Date Sent field are before – find any email before the specified date, after – similar, but any email after the date, and on – find only email on that date.

Email_Archiving_search_11

This will find all the email between the two addresses, because the email found has to have both those addresses in either the from or to field.  However, this will also find email from someone else to both those addresses, because that will also satisfy the search criteria of having both email addresses in the mail; just both in the To: field.

If the administrator was exporting all the correspondence between the two addresses, she could manually eliminate the emails that don’t have one of these addresses in the From field.

Email_Archiving_search_12
If the search for emails that do not meet your criteria is too great, you can get all the correspondence between two emails exclusively by running 2 searches, like this:
Email_Archiving_search_13
the Email From field and the other in the Email To, then reverse them.
Email_Archiving_search_14

You will notice that in these searches, the only fields were the Email From and Email To fields.  I removed the extra fields just to keep the examples clean.  You do not need to remove blank fields from the query screen if you don’t want to (and there are multiple examples of this above).

 

Searching: Multiple Fields Search Example

If you play with the add search term drop down, you will find that you can have multiple copies of the same search fields.  For some searches, that is legitimate. For example
Email_Archiving_search_15
those addresses.  This would be the equivalent of
Email_Archiving_search_16
Having multiple Email From fields, though would not find anything, because an email can only come from one address.  Similarly, multiple Email Date Sent fields doesn’t give you anything that can’t be found with a single one.

Didn't find what you were looking for?

Contact Us