Advanced Search Tips

Last updated on 2017-05-12 07:11:46

This article refers to Barracuda Message Archiver Legacy Release firmware or higher.

Punctuation is treated as white space in search strings with the following exceptions:

Email addresses and Internet hostnames – Treated as single searchable tokens.
Example: user1@mycompany.com is treated as a single searchable token.
Period (.) – When not followed by whitespace, a period is treated as part of a word.
Example: 1.2 is treated as a single searchable token.
Hyphen (-) – When a token containing a hyphen also contains a number, the complete item is treated as a part of the number.
Examples:
MD-1800 is considered a searchable word, including the hyphen.
hyphen-madness is treated as two words ("hyphen" "madness") with the hyphen treated as whitespace.

The search query tips in this article apply to both Basic and Advanced search queries.

Searches are performed across only the items to which you have access. Only messages that are owned by you, or those to which your account has been given access either as a Auditor or as an administrator, are searched on by your query. For more information on managing account access, refer to the User Roles section in How to Manage User Accounts and Roles.
All searches are case insensitive. The string polish matches both "Polish sausage is not a hot dog" and "Please polish this".
Partial, or substring, matches are not performed in text-based searches. If your search string is age, it matches only the 3-letter word "age", but not any words containing those three letters in sequence, such as "messages".
Wildcards can be used to perform a substring search, but they cannot be used as the first character of a search string. Entering *son will be the same as entering son.
Wildcards may not be used in multi-word phrases even when double-quoted.
Order does not matter, unless the words are in quotes. Searching for meeting room (no quotes) matches "Meeting in Room 23", "Room 34 is available for your meeting", and "the meeting room is empty". However, entering "meeting room" (with quotes) matches only "the meeting room is empty".
Certain common English words are ignored. See the Stop Words section for a complete list of the words that are ignored in searches even when used inside quotes.
Wildcard searches also respect Stop Words, so attaching wildcards to a Stop Word should be avoided since this is the same as if the word was not there at all. Entering to* does NOT match all words starting with the letters "to" such as "today" and "tomorrow", but is treated as if just * was entered, and therefore matches all words.
New messages received on the Barracuda Message Archiver may not appear in search results for up to 30 minutes. While messages are archived and indexed as they are received, the searchable index is updated every 30 minutes for performance reasons. If an immediate search is needed across new messages, the administrator can go to the BASIC > Administration page, and click Reload in the System Reload/Shutdown section to update the searchable index with new content.
Browser time zone is used unless the time zone is specified in a search query. For example, set the search criteria to All - Date - is equal to - 2013-01-21 15:41:50 -0500 where -500 is the time zone.

Stop Words

Stop Words are common words that are ignored in searches, and may be omitted. Recognized Stop Words are:

a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, such, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, with

Stop Words are also ignored in wildcard searches, so make sure that the wildcards are attached to letters that do not comprise a Stop Word in its entirety. For example:

(the AND meeting) – Equivalent to entering meeting or "the meeting". Matches both "no meeting minutes" and "the meeting". Does not match "the meetings"
be* – "be" is ignored, so this is treated as just *, which ends up matching all words