2009-09 – MailVault

September 29, 2009

Once you have the search results in front of you, what next?

Well view the message(s) and confirm that you have indeed located the mail you want. If you just needed to lookup some information, then you are done. However, if you want to send the mail to yourself or someone else, then read on.

At the bottom of the search page, a status section shows the number of matches to your query as well as the number of messages you have selected (by clicking on the check box next to each message summary). You can now forward the selected email in the following two ways:

1. Forward

Click the Forward button and in the displayed section:
Choose a user from the drop-down list or specify an email address to forward to.
Enter a subject.
Use the “Zip it” option to compress and reduce the size of the mail you are forwarding.
Send the mail by clicking forward.
The recipient receives mail from the MailVault admin’s email id as specified in Settings > Outbound email.

2. Forward as original

This works just like forward, except:

There is no “Zip it” option and the selected messages are sent out individually.
MailVault sends the mail to the recipient, while maintaining the orginal sender information in the email. The recipient is able to simply hit reply to respond to the original sender, making this an ideal way to restore a message or two deleted by mistake.

Note:
While an administrator is allowed to forward email to any user or email id, non-admin users have that flexibility only if they are allowed to (Settings > Core >Mail forwarding). The default setting allows non-admin users to be able to forward and forward as original only to themselves.

Delete (admin only)
An administrator is able to delete selected messages, making it useful to remove junk or other messages (like stuff from mailing lists, etc.) that may have made their way into the archive.

Do tell us if there are other ways in which you’d like to use your search results.

September 11, 2009

by sharad

0 Comments

Searching through the MailVault email archive

Our approach to MailVault’s search functionality is a little like that of Google Search. Keep it simple and return relevant results.

Most times it should “just work”. When you need to consciously slice, dice and zoom in through the clutter, the following information and hints will help you to make the most of MailVault’s simple search.

Where do we search?

In the email headers (sender, receivers, subject, date), the entire mail body and in the content of some types of attachments (doc, pdf, html).

Search terms

The search query can be made up of single words, multiple words and phrases. Additionally these can be combined using special operators. This is better explained using a few examples.

Exact matches

Search: mail
Will match documents containing the exact word “mail” (not mails, mailing, mailvault, etc.).

Matching any of the terms

Search: mail archive
Will match documents containing the word “mail” OR the word “archive”.

Keep in mind that when we enter multiple words separated by spaces, the default behavior is to match documents that contain any of the words.

Matching all terms

Search: mail AND archive
Will match documents containing the word “mail” AND the word “archive”.

Pattern matching

By default, wildcard pattern matching does not take place. You must explicitly use the characters ? or * to match exactly a single character, or zero or more characters respectively.

Search: mail*

Matches messages containing mail, mails, mailing, mailvault, etc.

Search: mail?

This will match mail and mails, but will not match mailing and mailvault.

Please note that you cannot use ? or * as the first character of any word in your search query. Doing so, will result in an“invalid query syntax” message.

Negating a term

Search: NOT microsoft
Using NOT negates the match. So, NOT microsoft would match all email not containing the word microsoft.

Search: archiv* NOT mailvault

To locate messages that talk about email archiving and don’t mention MailVault (although why would you? 🙂

Matching phrases

Search: “John Doe”
This would match all mail containing the phrase “John Doe”. You can search for phrases, by enclosing the search term within double quotes.

Grouping and building complex queries

Sometimes you may need to fine-tune your query to really zoom in on some information. You could use a combination of the tips above, as well as grouping to form a more complex query. Grouping is done using parenthesis.

Search: (John OR Jane) AND (archiv* NOT mailvault)

Something like this could be used to search for messages that must contain either John or Jane and talk of archiving, but not MailVault.

Using saved searches

If you need to run the same complex searches often, it will soon get tedious to keep typing out long queries. That’s where “Save search” comes in. Once you have fine-tuned your search and gotten the results you want, you can say “Save search”, give it a name and the next time around access it from “My searches”, right next to the search box.

Note: The search terms themselves are case-insensitive (apple, Apple, APPLE will all produce the same results), but the logical operators are case sensitive. You must use OR, AND, NOT in upper-case.

For the occasional times, that you may need to use additional criteria and filters, head over to the “Advanced search” page and use the point and click functionality to build your search query.

May you find the information you seek!

Using search results

Searching through the MailVault email archive