Quote:
Originally Posted by wdimmit  Searching only on name makes sense, but it is not what Zimbra has historically done. I've been unable to locate the change in Bugzilla that relates to this behavior, so I'm just trying to find out exactly what was done.
--Will |
There was indeed a change in 4.5 about this. The contact search box now uses "contact:" as the default search operator, instead of "content:" -- the contact: operator searches only across the name and email fields, and it always searches for substrings (implicit wildcard).
So, if you type "wdim", the server will search for everything starting with wdim, and return things like "wdimmit", etc.
This was done because it seemed like the thing that most people wanted most of the time: people really wanted partial strings to match, especially in cases where they had a contact with a difficult to spell name or such. Substring matching the entire contact tended (in our testing) to return too many results, and had some negative performance issues. Another advantage of the change is that it makes the contact search behavior more in line with the GAL search (we're trying to make those two "modes" work similarly so it is less confusing to people).
You can get the old behavior by manually specifying the "content:" operator -- so enter a search string like "content:something" (w/o the quotes) and it will look for exactly the word "something" anywhere in the contact exactly like it used to.
I don't know why this didn't get release noted -- sorry. There is a bugzilla bug about it, I'll try to find it and post it here.
Bugzilla
Wiki
Source
Contact Search Changes in 4.5GA 
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