What is email metadata?

Metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data. Email metadata therefore gives contextual information about emails. Some common email metadata fields are To, From, Cc, Bcc, Subject, and Date Sent. 

Searching for email information outside of the text body of the email with the Metadata search term, instead of a Contents search term, returns the most precise results. This is because the Contents term searches within the entire textual content of a document, while a Metadata term only searches within the document’s metadata.

To learn more about searchable metadata fields, visit Searching Metadata.

Smart Terms for emails

In addition to the standard email fields, Everlaw automatically generates smart terms for email fields. Smart terms are metadata terms that aggregate the values of several email metadata fields, replacing the need to create aliases and allowing you to search for fields that are captured separately in processing and are likely to be useful when considered together.

Smart terms are only available on the Search page and do not create a metadata field that can be seen in the review window.

The Parties and Recipients terms search across the From, To, Cc, and Bcc fields and the To, Cc, and Bcc fields respectively. For example, the Parties search term is useful when you want to see all emails that a certain person saw, regardless of whether that person sent, received, or was copied on them.

You can find Parties and Recipients under the Metadata search terms list.

For a list of all Everlaw smart terms, visit Search Terms and Their Definitions - Smart Terms.

To learn more about using metadata terms to construct robust searches within your project, visit Search Overview and Examples.

Search for participants

Everlaw parses email participant metadata values from available fields (i.e. To, From, Cc, Bcc) into  three categories: email address, entity (previously known as ‘’contact names”), and domain. This allows you to search for the parsed values individually. This allows you to search for the parsed values individually. These categories operate as follows:

• Domain: Refers to an email address’s domain (e.g. the domain for paul@example.com is @example.com).
  Selecting a domain returns every email that includes (per the search term used) an email address with that domain.
  In search, domains are marked with an ‘@’ image.
   
  
• Email address: Refers to the unique email address used in the email metadata field. Email addresses are normalized for capitalization so that every email with the same spelling is treated as a single address.
  Email addresses are marked with an envelope image.
  
  
• Entity: Refers to collections of one or more contacts — email addresses and names associated with specific individuals, which Everlaw collects as searchable metadata during document upload. Each entity is identified by the entity’s most prevalent contact name.
  
  

  Fun fact

  A contact is created in a project’s database any time a name is associated with an email address within an email field (e.g. “Shelley Corman  <shelley.corman@enron.com>”). The extracted contact’s name (in this case Shelley Corman) becomes associated with any email address ever used with that contact name.

  For two contacts to be grouped into an entity, there must be at least one email address that is associated with both contacts. Everlaw matches words shared between contacts while also taking into consideration common non-name words to prevent incorrect grouping.

  Selecting an entity returns all emails that include (per the search term used) email addresses / names associated with the entity.
  In search, entities are marked with a person image.

  

Additional search values

You also have the option to conduct a “No Value” search which pulls up documents with a null metadata value within the To, Bcc, Cc, and From search terms.

We also allow for free-form text, which supports advanced searches (e.g. proximity, wildcard, fuzzy).

You can select multiple entries for To, From, Bcc, Cc, Parties and Recipients search terms.

Search options: Any of, All of, Exclude, and nothing else

For email participant searches, you have the option to specify whether you want Everlaw to return documents with any of, all of, or none of the search entries, using the following options, respectively:

• Any of: Applies "OR" logic, returning results that include at least one of your search entries. For example, an email containing any single entry from your search will appear in the results.
• All of: Applies "AND" logic, returning results where all search entries appear together in the specified field.
• Exclude: Applies "OR" logic, excluding documents that include any one of the selected email participants from your results.

To make a search exclusive to the selected values, select the and nothing else option. This excludes documents that contain any additional values beyond those specified.

When using this option, consider the following:

• Selecting Any of along with and nothing else returns results where only one of the selected values is the only value in the field.
  For example, the following search (which uses the To search term) will identify emails that were sent exclusively to either Jeff Dasovich or to Steven J Kean. Emails sent to both of them (or to anyone else) will be excluded.
  
• Selecting All of along with and nothing else returns results where only the combination of entries you specified are contained in the field.
  For example, the following search (which uses the To search term) will identify emails that were sent to both Jeff Dasovich and Steven J Kean and no one else.
  
  

The and nothing else option is disabled in the following scenarios: 

• If there are free text and "no value" entries within the search
• If domain entries are mixed with entities and/or email addresses
• If the number of terms exceeds the limit that allows "nothing else" to be selected.
• If searching with the From field, in which denoting exclusivity is redundant.

Search email dates

Within Everlaw, email date sent metadata is typically mapped to the standard field Date Sent. This allows users to take many variations of the same information (e.g. Sent date, Sentdate, Sent_date) and search on them using a single term. Searching against Date Sent will use the standard Everlaw date picker where you have various options to specify both date and time.

Search email subjects

Everlaw stores email subject information in the standard field Subject. This field operates as a standard text field and supports both Exact and advanced searching.

Examples

Here are some examples of when and how to leverage these search options when conducting metadata searches across your project.

• To search for emails that are related to any specified entity or domain. For example, here we are searching for all documents with Eric Pinard or the domain @sandiego.gov as its Bcc, Cc, From, or To metadata values.
  
• To search for correspondences from multiple different senders. In the example below, we're searching for all documents from Myrna Dayton OR from Scott Turner.
  
• To search for a specific combination of entities Bcc’d on an email. In the example, we are searching for documents that contain all three entities in the Bcc field of an email: Luis Schaar, Ricardo Sanchez, and the domain @portseattle.org.
• Combine email metadata search terms with others. In this example, we are searching for documents rated hot, or documents that have more entities than only Myrna Dayton in the Bcc, Cc, or To field, and those that don’t have Myrna Dayton as a recipient at all.
  

Why are expected results not showing?

If you are not able to search within a certain metadata field, or you find that your search is not bringing up all the expected results, it may be because that metadata field was not provided or incompletely provided by the producing party for the documents on your project. 

You can check the documents’ metadata in the Review Window, or by including a column for that metadata field in the results table. If there are email metadata fields that are not present in Everlaw-processed documents (those that are prefixed with “#”), you can reach out to support@everlaw.com for clarification.