Is there a way to allow personal messages that you have sent or received to show up in the global search results? or to toggle this option on/off? I figured out that you could type in a keyword from a message and then: in: messages which will search your messages. The average user wouldn’t know that. Use Case: Some of our users are coaches and may want to keep a longstanding log of their players and the progress that they are making. Using DM’s to yourself is a great way to do this. They just create a standardized Topic Description like: :collision: COACHING: Customer_Name Then, every time they finish a training session they can add a comment about what they did and the next steps for that person. It’s kind of like using the messages tool as a CRM. In this case, being able to get to a Trainign log with a client, from the global search, would be convenient!

[image] jord8on: The average user wouldn’t know that. They aren’t supposed to — mixing PMs and regular posts In search results would be very unexpected.

[image] jord8on: The average user wouldn’t know that. There are a lot of nice options at /search; it’s difficult to explain all the options in a search popup modal, ya know?

Yeah I can see where you’re coming from. For my, likely outlier, use case with a coach working with people on the daily it could be nice to see those messages included in the search. But for the most part I don’t think others use their communities in this way. I personally rarely ever DM here in this community. But as I’m managing another community I’m DMing all the time and trying to get back to certain DM threads all the time. I personally am fine with using the in: messages boolean. I’m all about the shortcut keys!

Allow messages to show up in global search

Product Support

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) April 14, 2020, 9:10pm 3

They aren’t supposed to — mixing PMs and regular posts In search results would be very unexpected.

Topic		Replies	Views
Making "search messages" less prevalent UX	3	1524	December 21, 2017
Finding PMs sent to users who never posted in the topic Feature	19	1215	July 11, 2021
Unexpected results in advanced search on "only return topics/posts" and "In my messages" Feature	5	628	April 2, 2019
Surface in:all as an option in the Advanced Search UI Feature search	0	259	December 11, 2025
Ability to filter inbox by messages from a particular user? Product Support personal-messages	5	305	June 28, 2024

Allow messages to show up in global search

Related topics