---
title: "Search in plain language"
description: "Ask the command palette for what you want and it writes the query."
url: "https://openemail.uk/docs/knowledge/reading/ai-search"
area: "Knowledge base"
category: "Reading & organising"
status: "live"
---

# Search in plain language

Ask the command palette for what you want and it writes the query.

## Details

- ⌘K, then type something like “invoices from Stripe last month” and press Enter. Enter searches only when nothing you typed matches a command name, so a bare word like “archive” opens the folder instead. A sentence is what reaches the model.
- The model is given a description of the search syntax and today’s date, and hands back a query in that syntax: “unread mail from Stripe in the last month” comes back as something like from:stripe is:unread newer_than:30d. That query is what runs, and it replaces whatever you had searched for before.
- It is also what ⌘K shows. The chips under Active Filters are the query the model wrote, not your sentence, so you can see what was searched for. The × on a chip takes that part out and the results follow, and Clear All, ⌘⇧F or switching folders empties the search.
- It can only ask for what the syntax can say. There are no inbox categories, so a request for newsletters usually becomes a search for words such mail contains, like unsubscribe, and asking for “invoices over £200” will not filter by an amount. Anything the syntax cannot use is skipped when the query runs, so a request search cannot honour comes back wider than you asked rather than empty.