Message Archive Search

Message archiving is a method of storing a copy of email traffic for a domain — incoming messages, outgoing messages, or both — in a separate location on the mail server, independent of any user's mailbox. Message Archive Search is the tool administrators use to actually locate messages inside that archive once it has been building for a while. Rather than paging through a folder structure on disk, an administrator enters a set of criteria — a date range, an address, a keyword in the subject — and SmarterMail builds a searchable result set that can be reviewed, downloaded, or copied into a mailbox.

Two scenarios come up constantly for this feature. The first is a legal discovery request: opposing counsel, or a company's own legal department, needs every message exchanged between two specific addresses within a defined window, such as all correspondence between jdoe@example.com and procurement@example.com between March 1 and June 30. The second is a compliance or HR audit involving a former employee: someone needs every message sent or received by jsmith@example.com during their final 90 days with the company, regardless of whether those messages still exist in the employee's mailbox (which may have already been disabled or deleted). Because archived copies are captured independently of the mailbox, both requests can be satisfied even after the original messages are long gone from the user's Inbox or Sent Items folder.

Who Can Access Archive Search

Archive Search visibility is tied directly to how message archiving rules are configured, not simply to whether archiving is enabled somewhere on the server. This is the single most important thing to understand about this feature, because it explains why a domain administrator sometimes cannot find a search option at all even though the system administrator believes archiving is "on."

• System administrators can search the combined All Domains archive from this page in the system Manage area, but only when a rule has been created for "all domains" and that rule is enabled. If the system administrator instead drills into an individual domain's dashboard (Manage > Domains > a specific domain), any archive search performed from there is scoped to that one domain's archive rule, not the combined archive.
• Domain administrators only see a Message Archive Search option in their own domain's settings when a rule exists that names that specific domain and the rule is enabled with a valid archive path. A domain administrator does not inherit access from an "all domains" rule — that rule only ever populates the system-wide archive that system administrators search. For example, if archiving is configured only as an "all domains" rule, the administrator for example.com will not see an archive search option anywhere in their domain settings; the system administrator would need to add a rule specifically for example.com before that domain's administrator gains access.

In practice, this means a system administrator who wants to delegate archive search to a domain administrator (so that domain admin can handle their own legal or compliance requests without escalating every request) must create a domain-specific archive rule for that domain, even if an "all domains" rule is already capturing every domain's mail. The two archives — the system-wide one and any given domain's own — are stored and searched completely independently of each other.

Search Criteria

Whether the search is being run against the combined archive or a single domain's archive, the same search criteria are available:

• Start and End — The date range to search. Only messages received within this window are considered, so a narrower range both returns more relevant results and completes faster.
• From — Matches against the sender's address. A partial value is enough; searching for "example.com" in the From field will match any sender at that domain.
• To — Matches against the recipient's address, and is checked against the message's To, Cc, and full recipient list, so a user who was only Cc'd or Bcc'd on a message will still be found.
• Subject — Matches a word or phrase anywhere in the subject line. Leave this blank to match on sender/recipient and date alone, without regard to subject content.

Any combination of these fields can be used together. For example, to satisfy a request for "everything sent by the departed employee to their former manager during their last month," an administrator would set From to the employee's address, To to the manager's address, and the date range to that final month — leaving Subject blank to catch every message regardless of what it was about. If every field is left blank except the date range, the search simply returns every archived message received during that window.

Running a Search and Viewing Results

Starting a new search kicks off a background indexing pass across every archived day that falls inside the requested date range, so results appear progressively rather than all at once; a progress indicator shows the percentage of the archive that has been scanned so far. Because this is a background operation, an administrator can navigate away and come back later to check on a long-running search rather than having to wait on the page.

Only two archive searches can run at the same time across the entire server (this includes searches started by other system or domain administrators). If a third search is started while two are already running, it will fail to begin until one of the running searches finishes, so it is worth letting an existing search complete, or deleting one that is no longer needed, before starting another.

Results are presented as a list of matching messages, showing the sender, recipient(s), subject, and received date for each match — not the message body itself. To read the actual content of a message, an administrator opens it directly from the results grid, which displays the archived copy in a popout reader. Because a single search can match an enormous number of messages, the server also enforces a system-wide cap on the total number of matches a single search will collect (100,000 by default); if a search would exceed that cap, it stops collecting once the limit is hit and a "results truncated" warning is shown. When this happens, narrowing the date range or adding a From/To/Subject value and re-running the search as two or more smaller searches will produce complete results for each slice.

A completed search also respects the archive's retention period. If a message matched the search criteria but has since aged out of the domain's retention window (and been purged from the archive), it will no longer appear even though it matched at the time it was archived. A search's results remain available to revisit for as long as they are used at least once every 30 days; a search that sits untouched longer than that is treated as inactive and its results are eligible for cleanup.

Acting on Search Results

Once a search returns matches, an administrator can select one or more messages (or all of them) and:

• Download the selected messages, or every message in the result set, as a single .zip file containing the original .eml files — useful for handing a self-contained export to legal counsel, an auditor, or another system without giving that party direct access to SmarterMail.
• Copy to Mailbox the selected messages, or the entire result set, into a specific user's mailbox and folder. This is the typical way to hand off results to a compliance officer or outside reviewer who needs to work with the messages inside an email client rather than a batch of downloaded files, for example copying every match for a legal hold into a dedicated "Legal Hold" folder in a designated reviewer's mailbox.

Every search that has been run is listed on this page until it is deleted, along with its criteria, match count, and completion status, so a previous search's results can be revisited without re-running it.

For more detailed information on archiving, see Message Archiving.