Search

Sparrow indexes all your emails locally using Tantivy, a high-performance full-text search engine. You can find anything almost instantly — even messages from years ago.

Basic search

Click the search bar (or press /) and start typing. Sparrow searches across:

• Subject lines
• Message body (HTML is stripped, plain text is indexed)
• Sender name and email address
• Recipient email addresses

Results appear as you type.

Advanced search

Use the advanced search panel to combine filters precisely:

Filter	What it does
Free text	Searches across subject, body, sender name, sender email, and recipients
From	Filter by sender name or email
To	Filter by recipient email
Subject	Search within subject lines only
After / Before	Date range filter
Has attachment	Only messages with attachments
Unread only	Only unread messages
Starred only	Only starred messages
Account	Limit to a specific account

Combine them: search for "invoice" from a specific sender with attachments after a date — all at once.

How it works

Sparrow maintains a local search index on your computer. Every email is indexed when it arrives, with these fields:

• Subject (full-text, stored for display)
• Body text (full-text, HTML stripped)
• Sender name and email (full-text)
• Recipient emails (full-text)
• Date (for range queries)
• Has attachment, unread, starred (for filtering)
• Account ID (for per-account searches)

Tips

• Search works across all your accounts at once, or filter to a specific one
• Results are ranked by relevance — the best matches appear first
• Everything runs locally — search works even without internet
• If search results seem incomplete, you can rebuild the index in Settings > Search
• The search index uses about 50 MB of memory while active