Searching thousands of emails with Agent R for specific word in the subject field.

Question

Dear all,

I have hundreds of thousands of emails that were provided to me as individual files (e.g. *.msg).

I have crafted DOS searches that have been fairly successful in finding emails to, from or cc:'ing a certain party, like 'From: .xyz.com OR To: xyz.com OR CC: xyz.com'

I am searching for all the emails that have the subject 'party!'

However, although I know there is a field 'subject' in the raw text of the email, I have not been able to use similar logic with 'subject'. For instance searching for 'subject: party!' just pulls up all the emails that have the word 'party!' in them.

Would anyone be able to suggest a sensible approach, please? I had thought perhaps if there were an operator that could allow me to find 'party' within x characters of 'subject' that might work, but I have not been able to find an operator that suits.

I know that the the maximum length of an Outlook subject is 78 characters, so a search like 'subject W/78 party!' should work. Or a NEAR operator?

I note that the board software turns my use of wildcard 'asterisk' to an italic, so 'From: xyz.com' should be read 'From: (asterisk)xyz.com(asterisk)'

Many thanks for your thoughts!

HK

Answer 1

If the headers inside the .msg file are ok using quotes should work, e.g.

Containing Text: "subject: party"

You could switch to regular expression and try:

Containing Text: subject:.*party

---

Ideally you'd actually use FileLocator Pro which has specific MSG file support and doesn't rely on the Internet headers being inside the .msg file for searching. FileLocator Pro also has an option Add separate message body text attachment which displays the message as a text file with the name of the text file as the subject, which means you could simply search for:

File name:       party
Containing Text:
Look In:         C:\Location Of Msgs