Using wildcards in search

Overview:

Every search requires a name if you want to revisit it.  Ad-hoc searches can be created and not saved, however no actions can be taken on unsaved searches (exports, bulk operations, etc). By default Administrators, Compliance Officers, and Search Administrators have permission to view all saved searches.  Exporters and Reviewers require the specific access to the search in order to access. Non-admin users are granted read-only rights and cannot modify the scope of the search; they are only able to perform the actions of their role: Export or Review.  See the articles outlining Features available by role and Search Permissions.

Using wildcards:

You can use wildcard operators to locate messages and/or documents based on partial terms.  You can use the asterisk ( * ) operator to locate messages and/or documents that contain specified partial terms.  For example:

   

• contract* - Denotes any term that begins with “contract” (such as “contract”, “contracted”, or “contracts”).
• *@acme* - Denotes any term that contains the strings “@acme” (such as “acme.com or jo@acme.co.uk).
• awood* - Denotes any term that starts with the term "awood", most commonly for emails/usernames with multiple potential domains (such as "awood@acme.com", "awood@acme.net", etc)
  • Note on searching sender or recipients: email addresses are tokenized as a complete string, so simply searching for "awood" will not return results; either the full address needs to be searched for OR a wildcard should be used to produce the desired results.
• 43931* - Denotes any term that starts with the sequence “43931” (such as “43931.00” or 43931226).

   

You can use the question mark (?) operator to locate messages that contain a specified term, with a given character replaced.  For example:

   

• “???? ???? ???? ????”- Denotes any term that contains four sets consisting of four characters each with a single space between sets (4417 1234 5678 9012, a common format for credit/debit card numbers”).
• “???-??-????” - Denotes any term that contains a set of three characters, followed by a dash, followed by two characters, followed by a dash, followed by three characters (i.e. 123-45-6789, a common format for U.S. social security numbers).
• ?inks - Denotes any term that contains any character proceeded by the string “inks” (such as “links” and “rinks”).
• “well gra?e?” - Denotes any phrase beginning with the term “well” followed by a space and then a term that contains the string “gra”, followed by any character, followed by the letter ‘e’, followed by any character (such as “well graded” and “well grates”).

Note on Wildcards (*): Wildcards can be used with any kind of words or number as long as they contain at least 5 characters or numbers.  Using wildcards on words with less than 5 characters or strings with less than 5 numbers won’t be effective.

 

Note on leading wildcards (*): with the simple search you cannot use leading wildcards (at the beginning of a search term).  

For example: “*irsty” or “*17” would not return reliable results.