When searching in DISCO, if you do not specify a field, the search will look at the exact term you type and will find matches in the text of the document, plus with a few additional locations.
When dealing with an email, the text of the document includes everything that you see when viewing the image of the email, which includes the body of the email, the header information, the signature, and the footers, plus the bodies, headers, signatures, and footers of previous emails as copied in the text at the bottom of the primary email.
The search will also locate any matches in the following locations: the metadata field for the email subject; the custodian field; the author field (such as is often assigned in Office documents, and not to be mistaken for the sender of an email); and also several text entry fields in DISCO, including the Document Note, the Privilege Note, and any custom text entry fields.
The locations searched by a fieldless search are as follows:
- text;
- author;
- custodian;
- email subject; and
- text entry fields.
DISCO will not, however, make inferences about an email address to find occurrences where the name of the email's owner appears. For example, if your search is for "skilling@enron.com", then it will not bring back documents where merely "Skilling, Jeffrey" appears in the searched locations. The search will only bring back documents that have the exact characters entered into the search query.
In the above Jeffrey Skilling search, it is possible that the text of the document contains "Skilling, Jeffrey" and does not contain "skilling@enron.com". However, the "from" metadata of the document might contain "skilling@enron.com". A way to make your search more inclusive would be to additionally search for "participant("skilling@enron.com")", which would search for that address in the email From, To, CC, and BCC metadata fields.