Search by address group
 

I would like to search emails based on address group.

Example search:

SENT TO people whose address is listed in the address book under the group "school"

OR

RECEIVED FROM people whose address is listed in the address book under the group "school"

Anyone have any ideas what that would look like?

You can do this for messages you have received, but not for ones you have sent. For received messages whose sender address is in your "school" address book group, search for:
It's hard for me to show the space character and single and double quotes at the end. Here is that that string consists of:

• header:
• ' (single quote character)
• X-Spam-known-sender:
• (single space character)
• " (double quote character)
• school
• " (double quote character)
• ' (single quote character)

Bill

Thanks Bill.

I had used that same approach, although incidently the format that worked for me was:

header:"X-Spam-known-sender:school"

...replacing single quotes with double and dropping the double quotes around the search term.

As you point out, that is only good for the emails received and not for those sent to members of a particular address book group.

The other problem with searching through the headers in the way you suggested, is that it won't find emails from members of the address book group if the sender was not in the group at the time of receipt. So if Jane is in my class at school and sends me an email about the chess club and I then add her address to the group, the chess club email will not appear in the results.

What I am asking for is perhaps a feature request, but if anyone has any further ideas they would be most welcome.

I used the quotes because I had group names containing space characters. The X-Spam-known-sender is added when messages are received, and there are no useful headers with respect to groups when messages are sent (since this would reveal personal information to recipients).

So the only way I can imagine for you to search for such messages is by the email addresses.

Bill

It would seem to me that there is a pretty good circumvention. Set up a special identity that you always use when sending from the Group, and have an auto bcc that has a unique identifiable email address, such as school-group@myname.mydomain.com.

This doesn't solve this need:
If you create a special identity (such as BritTim suggests) and use it for sending and receiving all messages to this group, then you don't need to use Bcc when sending. You can then just search for messages which contain that identity (special alias) in any addressing field (From/To/Cc/X-Delivered-to). This requires discipline to implement, however. The other solution is to use a saved search for the individual addresses of the members of the school group, but this is slow if there are many group members.

Bill

Thanks for the suggestions.

Unfortunately the special identity solution isn't a practical one in my case, nor is a saved search for the individual addresses in the group.

I might have to escalate this to the level of much-needed feature in the search tools.