How to search in Front
Overview
Front has many options to help you search through your history effectively. Typing in words directly into the search bar will search all parameters for the matching term, or you can use search filters to narrow down your results. Front will show you the most relevant search results at the top of the list, and chronological results below that.
Instructions
Step 1
Click the search box. A menu will appear with search shortcuts. The down arrow will show you advanced search shortcuts (explained below). Alternatively, type + in the search bar to see all the filters.
Step 2
By default, Front will search in your selected inbox. To search across all inboxes (to include all messages), flip the toggle below the search bar to All Folders.
Important to know
- Search results match your exact search terms. Searching for Pete will only show results containing Pete — not Peter or Peters.
- Front supports searches by prefix. If you're looking for an email from Mathilde Collin, you can type math* or coll* without quotations.
- To search an exact phrase, use quotation marks around your search phrase to search an exact match, like "Weekly Team Update".
- You can stack multiple search filters.
- The ranking of the results suggestions after typing in your search is based on whether and how often the search term appears in key fields like recipient, subject, body, comments, etc. with different fields having different weights. We also give more recent results higher weights as they are more likely to be relevant.
Search filters
Using filters in your searches will help you narrow your search to specific team members, inboxes, recipients, and so on.
Inbox name, Inbox type
- inbox:inbox name - search conversations in a specific inbox
- type:inbox type - refines your search to conversations of a specific channel type (email, tweets, SMS)
Subject, Body
- subject: - refines your search to conversations with this content only in the subject
- body: - refines your search to conversations with this content only in the body
Conversations assigned or followed by a specific team member
- assignee:teammate name - refines your search to conversations assigned to a specific team member
- author:teammate name - searches for messages sent by one of your teammates
- participant:teammate name - refines your search to conversations that a specific teammate participated in
- commenter:teammate name - refines your search to conversations with comments left by a specific team member
- follower:teammate name - refines your search to conversations followed by a specific team member
Conversations with a reminder, comment, or attachment
- has:reminder - refines your search to conversations that have been snoozed or where a reminder has been set up
- in:comments - refines your search to conversations where comments have been made
- has:attachment - refines your search to conversations that have an attachment
- in:attachments *NEW* - refines your search to conversations where the text match is inside these file types: PDF, CSV, XLS, XLSX
Conversations with a specific recipient
- recipient:contact - refines your search to conversations with a specific contact either in the from, to, cc or bcc fields
- from:contact - refines your search to conversations sent by a specific contact
- to:contact - searches for conversations sent to a specific contact
- cc:contact - refines your search to conversations with a specific contact in the cc field
- bcc:contact - searches for conversations with a specific contact in the bcc field
Conversations archived, deleted, assigned, unassigned etc.
- is:assigned - searches for assigned conversations
- is:archived - refines your search to archived conversations
- is:deleted - searches for deleted conversations
- is:discussion - searches for all of your internal discussions
- is:following - searches for conversations that you follow
- is:muted - searches for conversations that you have muted
- is:open - refines your search to conversations either assigned or unassigned
- is:shared-with-me - searches for conversations that appear in your Shared with me folder
- is:snoozed - refines your search to conversations that have been snoozed
- is:spam - searches for conversations marked as spam
- is:starred - searches for conversations you've starred
- is:subscribed - searches for conversations that you are subscribed to
- is:trashed - refines your search to trashed conversations
- is:unassigned - refines your search to unassigned conversations
- is:unread - refines your search to conversations with unread messages
- is:unreplied - searches for conversations that haven't been replied to yet
Tags
- tag:tag name - refines your search to conversations tagged with a specific tag. You'll want to use an underscore ( _ ) in between words when searching for a tag name that includes multiple words.
For example, if you want to search for a tag named "Everything is awesome", you should enter exactly: tag:everything_is_awesome in the search.
- has:no-tags - searches for conversations without any tags applied
Dates
- before:date - searches for conversations before a certain date
- during:date (ex: during:2016-08 or before:2016-08-31 after:2016-08-01) - searches conversations received or sent during a specific date range
- after:date - limits your search to conversations received or sent after a specific date
To enter specific dates, use the following formats: YYYY-MM-DD
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Can we default the toggle to "ALL FOLDERS" - we find that's the one we want to use most frequently.
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Jon Cattivera Currently that's not possible, but I'll share your request with our product team.
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Cori Morris Is there a limitation to search in regards to age of emails? I have some emails in my frontapp inbox from a year ago however frontapp search doesn't find them.
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Tim, there is no limitation to how far back Front search will go. All your emails are indexed once they are in your account. Have you tried using some of the advanced parameters to drill down your results list?
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I agree with Jon Cattivera . Searching everything is for sure the most frequently used option. I've seen people of my team complaining that they couldn't find some email, but it was because they didn't select the all folders option.
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Andersen Yu all sorted. I signed up using an old trial. I deleted and re-added my mailbox. Working fine now!
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Anyway to make a "negative" search?
Lets say I'm searching a phrase and getting to many results... and want to remove all the results containing a specific word?
Maybe like this:
things with wheels not:cars -
Kristian Qvistgaard Currently that's not possible, but I will share this request with our product team for future iterations of our search feature.
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Cori Morris sounds perfekt...
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Hi Front Team,
I am using Front with three other sales people in an office setting. It is incredibly useful to use the search feature (e.g., "interest flat screen" to find previous conversations about our televisions with technical details); however, there is no real way to quickly find information within a message. The Word or Explorer equivalent would be Cntrl + F, i.e. the "find function."
Am I right that this does not yet exist?
Thanks for your help!
-Cullin -
Cullin Flynn We very much would love this same function. I don't believe there's a way now but I also could be missing something. We have very long threads, and digging through them all is cumbersome.
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Jon Cattivera Cullin Flynn Hi there!
This is on our roadmap, however, if you use our web app, you can use the find function.
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Cori Morris Thank you for the consideration.
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Cullin Flynn Jon Cattivera Good news! The cmd + f function is now live!
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That's great! However, it looks like it just finds one visible in the thread, and not what is in the collapsed emails (which I believe is just a default Front functionality and not something you can control preference-wise?) and you have to expand each message in the thread, then cmd+f again to find it. Is this accurate?
(Ideally, it'd auto-expand any collapsed threads that have that search term in them....)Let me know, and regardless, thanks for making progress on it!
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Jon Cattivera Currently, that is by design. The reason is because if it's a 50 message thread, having it expand all messages and search would cause delays in the app. We will be working on an expand all messages in a thread feature in the future.
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That makes sense—in that case, maybe if it had some other kind of indicator, or just opened the messages in the thread with the keyword, that'd be helpful. Regardless, great news that there's a bit better way and more progress in that direction.
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Cori Morris Is the expand all messages in a thread feature something coming along very far in the future? A little warning dialog mentioning that expanding all messages will cause delays in the app is all you need for now to set the right expectation for a user.
If you are optimizing said feature in the future I would understand but there should be no reason to not have this available at the moment. I'm here working with 100+ message threads and the fact that every single time I have to open all messages to find what I'm looking for along with the slow load time of scrolling within the messages in the thread. It's a bit of a nightmare for me here! -
Hi Victor Garcia
This feature is in our backlog currently, as the team is working on some major improvements to the app, which I'm sure you'll enjoy. We will post an update here once we have news!
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Any ways we can Save a search string or even better, convert them to Smart Lists?
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Is there an OR function for searches? For example, I want emails from Sender A OR Sender B in one search.
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If your team member needs to see your advanced search results, is the only option to send them your advanced search parameters (ex: before:2019-02-01 after:2018-12-31 tag:january_non_bug)? It seems like you can make it easier for your team member by providing them the URL of your search results (since it includes the advanced parameters in it).
I tested my advanced search results URL in an Incognito window, but it redirected me to a Front SSO login page. We do not use SSO for Front. Also, when I input my correct email/password it said it was incorrect.
So it looks like I cannot send my team member a link. Instead, they need to go to Front, copy + paste my advanced search parameters, and press enter. -
Jozef Bobek Hi there!
Your search results may look different from your teammate's search results. It's dependent on inbox access, and so on. It may be best to help you via email. Please feel free to write in to Front's support team.
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Guys, any news on negative search? Or smart folders of some kind.
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Cori Morris said:
tag:tag name - refines your search to conversations tagged with a specific tagIs it possible to look for emails without Tag ?
