Mailing list search service

W3C Mail Archive Search Engine Help

Table of contents

General hints for a better, more efficient search

Basic query

Enter one (or more) keywords in the input box, submit, and "voila".

Look for (Keywords):

Refining your query

By default, this search system looks up documents matching your search query in the wider range available. A likely consequence is that there will be a lot of results, which can be annoying. If you have information about the message(s) you're looking for, use it with the Header search or select a specific list or group of lists to search among.

Keywords search

Keywords search - How to

You can enter one or more keywords (separated by spaces), or write a "phrase" understood by our Namazu engine.

Multiple word query

• If you enter more than one term (separated by spaces), the engine will search documents matching all terms.
• If you want to search documents matching any term, just use "a OR b".
• You can ignore results matching a term by using "a NOT b".
• For advanced boolean fun, create groups with parenthesis+whitespace : "( fox OR dog ) NOT lazy".
  Note : the white spaces are mandatory.
• You can perform phrase search by surrounding terms with curly braces (no whitespace) : "{a b c}".
  single quotes are OK, too.
  (some bugs may remain, use at your own risks ;) )

Look for (Keywords):

Case, substrings and regular expressions

• Search is case insensitive. It means that "lazy dog" and "LAZY DOG" are equivalent queries.
• Use "*" for substring search:
  • Prefix matching : "laz*" (terms which begin with laz)
  • Nest matching : "*dog*" (terms which contain dog)
  • Suffix matching : "*over" (terms which end with over)
  Because it will likely return a lot of results, we do no recommend using substrings-based queries. You've been warned.
• Really advanced users can have a look at Ruby regular expressions. it looks like Perl. You can use those by surrounding them with slashes (ex: "/pro(gram|blem)s?/").

Selecting sources to search

You can choose where to perform the search by either choosing a list or group proposed by the menu, or enter one or several list names (separated with whitespaces) in the dedicated field.

Important note : do not forget to select the method you want to use by "clicking" the proper radio button.

Header search

Keyword search is the "basic" search, looking for a set of words in the whole message. In some case, you may want to search messages according to a specific piece of information. This is what "header search" is for.

Header search are both available with the simplified and full interface.
With header search, you can search, or refine your query, based on information included in the mail headers.

• Subject : search a pattern in the subject, title, object of the message.
• From : search a pattern in the name, or e-mail of the author of the message.
• Message-Id : the message id is a unique identifier for each message in the internet. You can search a pattern in this idenfier
• Date Search - search mails in a given period: it is possible to limit search results to a specific month, or year. Keep the month selection blank to limit search results to the whole year.

Note that header search is a pattern search. If you enter "foo" in the from field, it will look for messages including the "foo" substring. This means that "Foobar Smith <me@example.com>" or "Bernard <dufoor@example.com>" will match.

Examples of header search

Refining a query with header search.

Look for (Keywords):
subject frommessage-id

(Search messages from bob with the word "example" in it)

Search only in headers

Look for (Keywords):
subject frommessage-id

(Search messages from bob)

Source code for this search engine

A snapshot of the source code used by this search engine is available.