Nisus InfoClick - Manual (Page 32)

16 Normal Search groups Find What You Seek!
Figure 27
The contextual menu that appears when selecting text of a matched item
The Date search group
Perhaps you need to find all the emails that Kenneth Lay was involved (sent or received, CC’d or
BCC’d) in during a particular period, regardless of the subject. In this situation you would use the
Date search group. InfoClick lets you specify just the parts of the date you remember.
1. Click in the Date search group.
A menu with all the possible dates associated with the emails appears 3 . The Alternatives
checkbox is on by default (and cannot be turned off).
2. Click from left to right as many selectors as you need to narrow your search: the year(s),
month(s), day(s) of the month(s) and then the day(s) of the week.
☞
While clicking from left to right (year > month > date > day) may make conceptual sense, if
you know the date, it might be easier to search through the many possible thousands of
emails you may have received in a particular year by clicking in the reverse order. In that
case, click from right to left (date > month > year).
For example, in one sample database narrowing from year to date takes longer to display:
• 2012 92,009 items
• Nov. 12,637 items
• 27 th 380 items
…than narrowing from date to year:
• 27 th 11,552 items
• Nov. 910 items
• 2012 380 items
☞
Or, as another example, if you know a particular correspondence occurred on a weekend,
select Saturday & Sunday and continue from there.
☞
As yet another example, if you remember that the correspondence occurred during a
particular month, select that month and year and see what else is available.
3. Click Close List.
As illustrated in Figure 29 on page 18, once the year 2000 is selected, only those months in
which there was mail to or from Kenneth Lay are enabled in the month column, similarly, once
the month of June is selected only those days in June when he either sent or received mail are
enabled. In this way, InfoClick guides you to what you seek.
Because there is nothing you can do to modify the meaning of the dates, these bubbles have no
down-pointing triangle. However, you can right-click (or control-click) anywhere on the bubble.
This enables you to Cut, Copy, Paste, Copy Selector List, or access any number of Services
3 The years are taken from whatever the date field indicates in a particular email. There are no rules regarding what
people/software can put in email headers. Anyone who has received spam knows you can fake a From field, use
unusual dates, add custom headers, etc- there are no restrictions. So if an email is stamped as being from the
year 2044, as are some of the emails in the Enron collection, then, who are we to say otherwise!
As to how/why these occur, there are various reasons: misconfigured computers/servers or malicious intent.
Spammers sometimes use the tactic because it means the email will sort topmost in an inbox.
Don't believe dates before the year 1971. According to the Wikipedia, “ in 1971 the first ARPANET email was sent ”.