I was trying to search on a result in the email body that should be unique for each drive that I backup. However, the search is returning unexepected emails.
This is my search criteria.
This particular search item only appears once in each email based on the drive being backed up. The drive being backed up is actually the last letter in the search. However it appears that eMClient’s just retruning the entire list of emails. There are 1,933 emails in the folder and that’s how many the search returns.
If you need to find an exact phrase, you need to put it in quotes “”
But also, the search does not include special symbols, those are filtered out.
If you need more details on how the Search works, we have added a section in our Documentation which goes in more details: eM Client 10 Documentation | Search
I put my search in quotes and it’s still returning unexpected emails which if using the document search F4 cannot find the quoted text in the email yet shows in the list of emails making up the search results.
eM Client gives me the same problem. When I search for an uncommon first name, like “felix”, and limit it to the body, I get a bunch of messages that have no mention of felix. Quotes do not help for me either.
In this case, by special characters I meant commas, periods and other punctuation will be filtered out. Wildcards can work in some cases (in headers fully, in body at the end), but the colon in the search in this thread’s example will be filtered out and not used as part of the searched term.
What are the settings for your search (drop down under magnifying glass)?
Is server-side search enabled? If so, try turning it off and see if the same issue happens, in case the wrong results were given by the mail server.
If that does not change it, please let us know what version of the app this happens with.
That would depend on the server, different ones could have the feature implemented differently - perhaps this mail server supports server search from 3rd party apps (not all do), but not exact phrase with the quotes “”, for example, in which case it might be returning all messages with words search, is, not and working in your example.
Turning off server search worked for me as well. Since in general I download all messages and all message bodies, this is an acceptable “fix” for my use. All of our servers are either Google Workspace or Apple, so I’m not sure why this would be so erratic with Server Search on.
In any event, I’m happy that I have a solution for now.
I’m curious if your app even truly downloads all messages because the other day I went to Lowe’s to pick something up and I had to access my pickup email through the browser because I couldn’t get it downloaded into the Android app which oddly was why it wasn’t able to be searched which was why I turned on the server search. If you can’t fix the server search then I’d strongly suggest you fix something to ensure that I can have a successful search of data I know should be there.
Whether eM Client downloads the messages in full depends on your account settings. You can change the scope of which messages are synchronized (whether ALL messages, or just from specific timeframe) and if they are downloaded or not (you can download just the header/message list data or full message text) - this is customizable since not everyone might have enough space on the device or they might be using metered connection so downloading a large amount of data is not the desired behavior.
It took me a while to find where to disable server search, it’s not in the menu system but in the drop down menu in the search bar, click the down-arrow beside the magnifying glass. It’s called “use server search if available”. Mine had a check mark. Removing the check mark is making the search not return messages not containing any of my search terms.
