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Forgiving words and operators like from: and has:, inside the folder you are reading.

Details

  • OpenEmail-hosted mail is indexed per mailbox for listing and search.
  • The query is ANDed with the folder you are in, so a search from Inbox does not reach Archive, Sent or Spam. Name another folder in the query to look there instead: in:sent, in:archive, a folder is: such as is:spam, or in:anywhere for every folder at once, which works on its own as well as beside other terms. Drafts is the one folder a query cannot leave.
  • Words are forgiving. Case, accents and separators are ignored and part of a word counts, so “min”, “BEN” and “ben jamin” all find Benjamin, and so would Ben-Jamin. Every word has to appear. A quoted phrase is stricter: it has to appear as written, give or take case and accents, so “ben jamin” in quotes will not find Ben-Jamin while “quarterly invoice” finds Quarterly invoice. Filler such as “show me emails about” is dropped when there is something else to look for.
  • Operators narrow it: from:, to:, cc:, subject:, body:, label:, filename:, in:, is:unread, is:starred, has:attachment, has:pdf, after:2026/01/31, before:, newer_than:7d and older_than:1y. OR, parentheses and a leading minus combine them, so (from:stripe OR from:paddle) has:pdf -is:read reads the way it looks. Recipients are held as one list without roles and never include a Bcc, so cc: reads the same names as to: and bcc: matches nothing of its own. from:me is mail you sent, and to:me is mail with one of your addresses, aliases included, among the recipients or as the address it was delivered to.
  • A value search cannot use is skipped rather than narrowing, so a typo in a value widens the results instead of emptying them. That is category:, larger:, smaller:, size:, messagesize:, list:, rfc822msgid:, received: and sent:, the category words such as is:promotions, a has: word that names no kind of attachment, an importance: other than high or low, a date that cannot be read, and a period whose unit is not h, d, w, m or y. An operator name it does not know, project: for one, is searched as plain text.
  • Words and the from:, to:, cc:, subject: and body: operators read the newest message in the thread, and the next reply replaces all of it: sender, recipients, subject, and a plain-text body snippet with HTML stripped, whitespace collapsed and the first 4,000 characters kept. A word that appears only in an earlier message, or past that cut, will not match. The whole thread is kept, it is simply not what search reads. A sealed message has no body text here, so only its sender, recipients and subject can match.
  • Labels, folders and attachments are the exception: label:, in: and is: read the whole thread, and filename: and has: read every attachment on it. Dates read the thread’s newest activity in UTC, with after: including the day you name and before: leaving it out. Results come back newest first, with no ranking above that.
  • Every mailbox is searched this way, and the query never leaves for anybody else’s search engine.