We've added new features to our mail archive search engine. Our new features allow you to search for messages from specific names and with specific words in the subject. You can also limit your search to specific specific years and/or months and/or days. Finally, we cleaned up a handful of bugs in our advanced search interface that were resulting in faulty results.

KernelTrap mail archive searching is provided with the Sphinx search engine. Going to our advanced search page you will find several text fields on the left side of the screen used for building complex search queries. Two recently added fields allow you to limit your message search to who sent the message and to specific words in the subject. For example, here's a search for all messages in our archives from "Richard Stallman". Here's another search for all messages in our openbsd-accounce mail archive containing the word "release".

A new column on the right side of the advanced search screen allows you to limit your search to specific years and/or specific months. For example, here's a search to find all messages from Linus Torvalds in our archives from January through March of 1992. And here's a search for all messages from Ingo Molnar on the Linux Kernel mailing list containing the word "CFS" in the header and "performance" in the body from September of 2007.

Observant searchers will note that the advanced search page simply builds a query for you then redirects you to your bookmarkable search results. You can fine tune your search by editing the query in the search block at the right side of the screen. To limit your search to a specific year, we set a "@year" flag followed by the year. For example, to search for messages from 2007 we'd set "@year 2007". The same works for months, for example to search for messages from January of 2007 we'd set "@year 2007 @month 1". You can manually limit your searches to a specific day in the same way. For example, to search for messages from January 1st, 2007, we'd set "@year 2007 @month 1 @day 1".

A few more examples combining multiple advanced search features:

• Example 1: Stable 2.6.23.y kernel announcements from Greg Kroah-Hartman in October and November of 2007.
• Example 2: DragonFlyBSD release announcements by Matthew Dillon in January of any year.
• Example 3: OpenSSH release announcements containing the phrase "security changes".
• Example 4: Git releases by Junio Hamano in 2005.
• Example 5: Messages in our historical Linux Activists mailing list from Alan Cox on August 4th, 1992.