Searching Group Chats

This feature is only available in SmarterMail Enterprise.

On occasion, you may need to refer to a previous chat conversation you had with a contact. One of the best things about SmarterMail is that it indexes all communication, so all of your chats are stored and, therefore, retrievable, so your information is never too far away.

Start a Chat Search

There are 2 ways to search group chats:

• Each user has the ability to download their own chat transcripts, or
• Depending on how Message Archiving is set up, a system administrator and/or a domain administrator can use Message Archive search.

User Chat History

When viewing a group chat you've had, either with another user or with a group (Alias), in the chat window, next to your Display Name, is an Actions (...) button. Clicking that, and selecting "Download chat history" allows you to download a text file that is the history of all of the chats you've had with that user or group. You can save a zipped version of that file (it's compressed because that text file can be quite large) to your local machine, then open it in your favorite text editor. Using the search feature of that text editor allows you to find the search phrases you're looking for as well as the entire threads where those search phrases were discussed.

Message Archive Search

As mentioned in other places in this help document, SmarterMail has the ability to archive any and all communications that travel through it. SmarterMail archives at the Spool level, which means that any message that is sent through, or received by, SmarterMail is archived before any additional actions are taken on it. So, if a message comes into a mailbox but the user deletes it, SmarterMail will still have that message saved in the archive because it's stored BEFORE the message reaches that end user. The same is true for group chat. That said, the ability to do a full archive search on group chats depends on how the system administrator has Message Archiving set up for your particular domain. For archive search availability, you'll want to check with your domain administrator first, then your system administrator.