Crawler Support

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What are search terms?

To acquire the most accurate search results, please read about following search rules:

Capitalization
Crawler searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case, i.e., searches for peter brown, Peter Brown, and pEtEr BrOwN will all return the same results.
"OR" queries
If you include OR between the search terms, Crawler returns emails that include at least one of your search terms.

Example: to find emails that contain vacation or holidays just type in "vacation OR holidays".

Automatic "AND" searches
If you want to search for an email that includes two or more search terms, just type them one after another. There is no need to include "and" between terms.

Example: "John Peters bike" will find emails that contain all three of these terms.

Wildcard search
Automatic wildcard (multiple characters) search
is applied only to a string with the minimum length of 3 characters that consists of only letters and numbers like 123abc, myname, Omega147.
If you use more strings in your search query, each string that match this condition is processed as wildcard. E.g. my car is black is processed as my car* is black*
That is, all the words beginning with this string are found as a result. For example the search query test, will return all results beginning with the string test so words like test, tests, tester, testing, etc…
Please note: if the string contains any special character like question mark, asterisk or double quotes or the string is shorter than 3 letters then wildcard search is not performed automatically.
To prevent automatic wildcard search just put the phrase in double quotes, see section Phrase searches for details.
You cannot use a "*" or "?" symbol as the first character of a search, e.g., *test.
Manual wildcard search
You can also use wildcard searches in the middle of a term, e.g. te*t.
To use wildcard search for short 1 or 2 letters terms just add asterisk at the end of term, e.g. t* or th*. As a result you will get all words beginning with t respective th
To perform a single character wildcard search use the question mark. E.g. te?t results in list of emails containing terms text, test and other term combinations.

Automatic exclusion of common words
Inbox.com ignores common words and characters such as "is" and "the", as well as certain single digits and single letters, because they tend to slow down your search without improving the results. You will have better results if you search emails by submitting unique words, i.e., if you remember that the email you are looking for contained the word "horses" type in "horses".

Phrase searches
Sometimes you'll only want results that include an exact phrase. In this case, simply put quotation marks around your search terms, i.e., search email contaning the phrase "many nice cars" or email from "Peter Brown".

Negative terms
If your search term has more than one meaning (bass, for example, could refer to fishing or music) you can focus your search by putting a minus sign ("-") in front of words relating to the meaning you want to avoid, i.e., to find emails about bass-heavy lakes, but not bass-heavy music type in "bas -music". Note: If you include a negative term in your search, be sure to include a space before the minus sign.

"+" search
If you add plus sign "+" before a word in a list of words, the search engine requires that the term after the "+" symbol exists somewhere in a field of an email, i.e., you submit "+dog cat mouse", the search engine will search emails containing terms "dog" and cat or mouse. However, if there was an email containing only cat and/or mouse, it wouldn't be found.

Escaping Special Characters
If your search term contains following special characters: "+", "-", "*", "?", "\", you have to use a backslash before you type them, e.g., if you're looking for "3+4", type in "3\+4". Note: Don't use a space between the backslash and special character.

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