Revisiting Excluding specific database in global search

DEVONthink
1

From an old thread in 2014 consider the following situation. I have 3 frequently used databases open

  • DB1
  • DB2
  • DBAppleMail
    The last database is an archive of all my emails. Now I would like to search for the word “popcorn” in all open databases EXCEPT DBAppleMail mostly because I do not want to retrieve all the conversations about a specific project, only the documents in the database. This happens surprisingly often in my daily work.

My question is whether I can exclude specifically the DBAppleMail database (back in 2014 this was not possible). It doesn’t seem possible in DT3 either. This for instance does not work:

popcorn scope: NOT DBAppleMail

There are work around of course:

  • Closing DBAppleMail and search using all remaining open DBs
  • Specifying the kind of file with a 2nd criteria
  • Restricting to a specific DB if you know the file you are searching for are in there.

These cost a little more time. It also seems to me that it makes sense sometimes to be able to exclude databases where you are sure that your file/group are NOT there instead of listing all open DBs.

2

So far it’s only possible to choose scopes but not to exclude scopes.

Another possibility is to sort the results by location. When exactly is DBAppleMail actually used? Only while importing/archiving emails?

3

Noted the additional option of sorting the results by location (which is good for learning).

To answer your other question I use the DBAppleMail for reference as as cross-cutting database. For instance a typical project will have documents which for the sake of the example would be located in DB1 and DB2 and will typically involve a lot of email correspondence e.g. DBAppleMail. So I find it useful to dig up with DT3 the relevant emails for checking the context and purpose, perhaps add some annotations as to what they mean in the project context.

In addition I find it simpler searching the DBAppleMail archive than using the actual email client. So in that sense it serves as a general history of all exchanges.

4

Another possibility is to append “kind:!email” (without quotes) to your search string, this will exclude all emails.