Searching Your Mail

Searching your mail

Sup supports the following kind of searches:

• In buffer (i.e. the text as displayed on your screen, rather than the underlying message)
• [Quick label](##By Label)
• [Full (general)](##By Content)

##Buffer

Simply press the forward slash key (/) and type your text. This behavior similar to vim and other console apps you're already used to. Remember that this only searches the text as displayed on screen, so it's great for partial subject lines and summaries, but for email searches, you're probably more interested in the other options.

##By Label

Press l to do a quick label search. You will then be prompted for a label; hit enter to bring up scrollable list of all the labels you've ever used, along with some special labels (Draft, Starred, Sent, Spam, etc.).

Highlight a label and press enter to view all the messages with that label.

##By Content

For a general search, press \ (that's backslash, following console conventions). Now type in your query. You can just type in arbitrary text, which will be matched on a per-word basis against the bodies of all email in the index, or you can search against [specific fields](##Field search) of your emails as described below.

Searches containing multiple words are treated as an "OR" search. If you want to search for a specific phrase, enclose it in double quotes. In other words: three contiguous words would be treated as three OR contiguous OR words any message containing any of those items, where "three contiguous words" would be treated as searching for that exact phrase.

##Field Search

Specific message fields can be searched by using <field name>:<query>, e.g.: label:ruby-talk, or from:[email protected]. (Fields include: body, from, to, subject, label, and others.)

###Attachments Search for all emails with attachments using has:attachment (mails with attachments automatically get labelled with the label attachment when indexed). Specific filetypes can be searched for using has:attachment filetype:pdf. You can also specify filenames using filename:somefile.txt.

Spaces in filenames require parentheses around the filename: filename:(some file with spaces.txt).

###Wildcards Wildcards are allowed in most searches, but they must be escaped by backslash, i.e.: subject:\*viagra\*, from:william\*

###Negation Force non-occurrence (negation) by -, e.g.: -body:"hot soup".

###Advanced date queries If you have the chronic gem installed, you can do date queries like before:today, on:today, after:yesterday, after:(2 days ago), during:february, and so forth. Note that parentheses are required for multi-word descriptions.

###Combinations & Labels You can combine those all together. For example: label:ruby-talk subject:[ANN] -rails on:today

By default, query terms are combined with AND, i.e. all conditions must be true. The example above is equivalent to: label:ruby-talk AND subject:[ANN] AND -rails AND on:today

Exception: Query terms within the same field type are combined as OR. subject:apples subject:oranges will find apples as well as oranges, it is equivalent to subject:apples OR subject:oranges

You can make this explicit by using conjunctions like "AND", "OR", "NOT".

###Shortcuts and others is:spam is translated into label:Spam, likewise for some other shortcut queries (in, has). Note that it will be OR'd with other label: queries!

msgid:[email protected] is useful if you have a unique identifier for an email.

###Even more advanced queries Play around with the search, and see the Xapian documentation for details on more sophisticated queries (date ranges, "within n words", etc.)

For a complete description of all search keywords, check lib/sup/index.rb, in particular, search for PREFIX.