Find what was written eight years ago

Just search

Words in the search field are looked for in the subject, the people and the text of every message, and in attachments:

• PDF,
• Word, Excel and PowerPoint (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx),
• RTF, HTML and plain text such as .txt or .csv.

Somebody looking for a project types the project's name, not Invoice_2024_11.pdf. Searching attachments is on by default; for an archive where speed of intake matters more, it can be switched off.

German umlauts and their spelled-out forms find each other: Terminbestätigung also finds Terminbestaetigung, and the other way round.

Search precisely

A word before a colon narrows the search to one part of the message:

AND, OR, NOT and brackets

Terms can be combined:

from:anna AND (subject:invoice OR subject:reminder) NOT flag:seen

That finds invoices and reminders from Anna that were never opened in the mailbox.

Smart folders

A query you need often is kept under a name in the sidebar and counted as mail arrives: “Invoices with PDF”, “Open reminders”, “Tax and accounts”. Everything above works in it the same way.

In the editor a smart folder is built as a tree: twenty-four fields, combined with AND, OR and NOT up to four levels deep. Its counts are cached and thrown away as soon as the archive changes.

By digest

Every message carries its SHA-256, on its export and in the control report. Paste it into the search field, whole or its first sixteen characters, or write sha256: in front of it. A line in a report leads straight to the message.

For analysis

On the command line, mailvault table writes the message index as CSV, TSV or SQL for a spreadsheet or another database, and mailvault query takes read-only SQL: only SELECT, one statement, no changes.