Lotus Notes: Searching email by fields

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I'm using Lotus Notes 8.5.2 in a large corporate deployment. I'm trying to figure out how to search my email in a structured manner, e.g. by specifying criteria on fields.

The help seems to suggest that I can use fields in square brackets and a list of operators, e.g. to find all mail where the From field contains John, I'd search for

/[From] CONTAINS John

However, I can't get this to work – any operator style query I've tried returns zero documents. "Web-style" queries (e.g. typing John into the search dialog) work, but I'd really prefer a way that would let me search more precisely.

Potential issues:

  • I'm assuming that the field names can be taken from the list of things I see when I open a mail and look at its Document Properties.
  • Full text indexing is turned off for my mailbox, and all my attempts to create my own have failed.

Does anyone have better information on searching by from/date/subject conditions in Notes?

Best Answer

The important question here is whether the mail file that you are searching has had a full-text index built. When you bring up the search bar (via View menu, 'Search this View'), look at the upper right of your screen. There should be an indicator that says 'Not indexed' (with a yellow light) or 'Indexed' (with a green light).

If it is indexed, then the [From] CONTAINS syntax should work.

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