4.4 Searching

The search box lets you filter the records of the selected sources to display only those records that match the search criteria.

There are two kinds of indexed searches:

Anywhere: Searches the contents of the records, as well as the Title, From, To, Cc, attachment names, tags, and notes.
Notes: Searches the notes of the records.

These support an enhanced query syntax:

&, AND: Boolean AND. The <space> character also represents a Boolean AND.
|, OR: Boolean inclusive OR.
!, NOT, -: Boolean NOT. For example, apple -orange finds records that contain apple and do not contain orange.
(, ): Opening and closing delimiters for logical grouping. For example, (apple AND orange) OR (apple AND pear) finds records that contain apple and another fruit, but not ones that contain only apple.
": Opening and closing delimiter for phrase-based searching. Phrase-based searches find records that contain all of the words in sequence.
*: Wildcard for prefix or suffix. Ignored in phrase-based searches. To search for a partial word, use two *’s, e.g. *ant* will find ant, repellant, anthem, and words with ant in the middle. If Match Partial Words is checked, EagleFiler will find partial word matches without your having to type the wildcards each time.

There are also five kinds of exact searches:

Filename: Searches the filenames as displayed in the records list.
From: Searches both the names and e-mail addresses.
Tags: Finds records that have the specified tag names. If Match Partial Words is not selected, tag searching is exact, so you must type the complete tag names (with the proper case).
To/Cc: Searches both the names and e-mail addresses.
Title: Searches record titles and message subjects.

For both indexed and exact searches, you can restrict a search to records with certain tags by adding tag:<tagname> at the beginning of the query. (This syntax is not available in smart folders; there you should create a separate Tags criterion.) The search will then match only the records with all of those tags. For example, searching for tag:apple steve means to search for steve and show only the records with the apple tag. Searching for tag:mac tag:ipod halo !bungie means to find all the records that include the word halo, do not include the word bungie, and have both the mac and ipod tags.

To perform complex searches with multiple criteria, use the New Smart Folder… command.