An email address is expected. You may type only a part of the address and hit the space bar to autocomplete: a list of addresses containing the substring typed will then be fetched and shown in the combobox. Any means that the messages to retrieve must have that address either in a From, To, or Cc field.

This field offers a list of pre-selected choices like Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days and a few other that implicitly refer to the current date. Range is a special case: it enables date pickers for entering specific start and end dates. Each of them is paired with a checkbox. When Start is checked, messages older than the start date will be filtered out. Conversely, when End is checked, messages newer than the date next to it will be filtered out. When both are checked, the message dates must be in the range between Start and End. When both are unchecked, it is equivalent to choosing Any in the pre-selected choices: this date filter is disabled.

an email address is expected, and autocompletion is available by hitting the space bar, as for the From/To/Cc/Any input field.

a substring that the message subject must contain. The search will be case insensitive.

a substring that the message body must contain. Be aware that the search is case sensitive.

This field should be used by users who know SQL and the Manitou-Mail database schema. The input has to be a sql statement that returns a list of mail_id. Example:

 SELECT mail_id FROM attachments
WHERE content_type like 'image/jpeg' and content_size>1024*1024

(that query will retrieve any message to which a big jpeg image has been attached). As with any other field of the query dialog, the result of that query will be ANDed with the other criteria.

An edit field for a tag name with dynamic auto-completion in a drop-down list. Selecting a tag contrains the results to messages to which that tag is assigned. The hierarchy of tags is flattened so that child tags are expressed as parent_tag->child_tag

Pressing the "More..." button will display a panel of all possible status combinations, with "Yes","No" and "Either" choices for each one. The status is a set of boolean properties (properties that can be true or false)

For example, choosing "No" for "Replied", and "No" for "Forwarded", and "Yes" to "Processed", means you want to constrain the messages to retrieve to those that have been marked as processed, but for which no reply has been issued, and that haven't been forwarded as well.

An integer is expected in this field. It will limit the segment of messages first fetched from the database to this size, even if there are more messages that match the criteria. After the first fetch, more results can be obtained by navigating through the segments with the Fetch next segment and Fetch previous segments commands. Whether older or newer messages are retrieved first depends on the "Messages order" setting in the preferences (Section 1, “Display”).

This limit is intended to avoid waiting too long for results or consuming too much memory if the query isn't narrowed enough to retrieve a reasonable number of messages. Several thousands of messages to fetch in one go is reasonable, but millions of messages is typically not (it actually depends on the throughput of the network link with the database and the capacity of the computer running Manitou-Mail user interface, though).

When checked, only messages that have the status trashed will be retrieved. This is analoguous to searching in a trashcan folder.