Finding a conversation

The search box above the list looks in two places at once, and the difference is worth knowing.

Searching what Steerd has

Typing filters the stored conversations by subject, by who was involved on either side (senders and recipients, not just the last one), and by the preview text of the messages.

It searches everything stored, not the page in front of you, and it combines with the filter you are on: search inside Linked and you are asking "conversations filed to a project about this".

What it cannot search is the full text of message bodies. Those are encrypted with your team's key, which is the point of storing them that way, and searching them would mean decrypting your whole archive on every keystroke. The mail server can do that job instead.

Searching the mail server

For admins, a search in the Inbox under All also goes to every connected mailbox. It reaches mail Steerd never pulled in, including anything older than what arrived when you connected. Those results join the same list, marked On your mail server.

• Gmail takes its own search syntax. older_than:6m invoice or from:anna@ work exactly as they do in Gmail, and it searches message bodies too.
• IMAP searches the whole folder the connection reads, by subject, sender and message text. Other folders on the server are not part of it.

The search starts once you stop typing, with one request to each connected mailbox. Paging past the end of the list asks each mailbox for its next results.

Opening what you find

Opening a result marked On your mail server pulls that message into Steerd and opens it as an ordinary conversation, which you can then reply to, link to a project or promote.

Two things to know:

• It imports that message, not the whole thread it belongs to.
• The import is permanent in the ordinary sense: the message is now stored like any other, subject to the same retention and the same deletion rules.

A message you already have opens as the conversation you already have, so opening it twice costs nothing.

Importing a message you had ignored is refused, and Steerd says why. Lifting a block is not possible from the app yet, so see Ignoring a sender before you block anything you might want back.