Keyword Search Tips

Follow these tips to create more targeted, efficient keyword searches:

• Choose specific, descriptive keywords.
• Searches are not case sensitive.
• Most special characters are not allowed, or are ignored, in personal mail searches.
• The one special character that is used is the dash (-), which excludes from the search results documents that contain the following term or quoted phrase.
• For example: The search anyone ‑anydomain would return emails and attachments that contained anyone that did not also contain anydomain.
• Spaces are not allowed between the - character and the following term or phrase.
• The Archive’s search index is based on whole words or tokens, not partial words or individual letters or numbers.
• For example: The search term mail would not return documents containing the term gmail.
• For example: The search term company would match person@company.com, but not person@newcompany.com.
• Wildcard characters are NOT needed because search automatically adds an implied wild card (*) at the end of every search term.
• For example a search term of gma would match gma, gmail and gmails.
• Further define your searches using quoted or unquoted search strings. See Quoting Search Strings.
• Use Stemming to let the search engine help search for words with the same root.
• For example, if you type project the search also matches the words projected, projecting, and projects.
• Use Stop Words to improve search engine speed by weeding out unnecessary terms.
• For example, if you type the quick brown fox, it searches on quick, brown and fox, because the appears in almost every email.