Email senders or recipients search

The sender and recipients fields of email are the From, To, and Cc fields. In some cases, the Bcc field is also searchable. Ask your eDiscovery administrator if the Bcc field is configured to be searchable for your site.

When specifying email addresses, do not include the less than character (<) or the greater than character (>) that often surround email addresses in preview mode. These characters are displayed for clarity when users preview email but these characters are not actually part of the email addresses. Searching for email addresses that are enclosed in < and > characters will not return any results. Be careful not to include these characters when copying and pasting email addresses from the Preview pane into the sender and recipients search fields.

Valid email address search terms	Invalid email address search terms
`sue.smith@example.com`	`<sue.smith@example.com>` `\<sue.smith@example.com\>`
`HR_DEPT@example.net`	`<HR_DEPT@example.net>` `\<HR_DEPT@example.net\>`

Examples of valid sender or recipients searches:

Common name search: "john q. smith"
Common name search with wildcard characters: jo*
Common name search with a Boolean operator: john AND smith
Common name search with multiple Boolean operators: (john OR bill) AND smith
Email address search (Internet format): "jqsmith@example.com"
Email address search (Hierarchical format used by Lotus® Domino®): "john q.smith/headquarters/company"
Email address search (Canonical format used by Microsoft Exchange): "cn=john q.smith/ou=headquarters/o=company"

Important: To ensure that you find all emails of a specific person or custodian, search for all email address format variants by using the OR operator in searches. Email formats include:

Email format	Example
Canonical	`CN=FirstName LastName/OU=Sales/O=MyCompany@MYCOMPANYDE`
SMTP or Internet	`FirstName_LastName@my_company.com`
Display name	`FirstName LastName`
Abbreviated or hierarchical	`FirstName LastName/Germany/MyCompany`

Always place double quotation marks around email addresses to ensure that the parts of the email address are only found in that order. A query without quotation marks for tom@jerry.com might also find jerry@tom.com.

Do not use wildcard characters inside double quotation marks. If you need to use wildcard characters, do not add quotation marks.

Ensure that you escape the = and / characters in canonical email addresses. For example, "CN\=FirstName LastName\/OU\=Sales\/O\=MyCompany@MYCOMPANYDE"

To use wildcard characters within email addresses, add a blank character after the part that contains the wildcard character.

Examples of wildcard characters within email addresses:

catch* @mycomp.com will find catch22@mycomp.com.
However, catch*@mycomp.com will not work as intended.
con*able \@mycomp.com will find constable@mycomp.com.
However, con*able@mycomp.com will not work as intended.