How to search for your contacts
Filtering your searches allows you to view or send to a smaller selection of contacts by setting options to only find particular contacts.
This means that you can search for individual contacts, entire domains, email addresses that contain particular words, confirmed, bounced or active contacts or any combination of these.
To do this you can make use of the filtering options that you are presented with when viewing contacts, sending email campaigns and setting up your autoresponders.
Filtering by the basics
There are a few filtering options that will be available to you each time you filter your searchs'. These include "Email Address", "Format", "Confirmation Status", "Status", "Filter By Date", "Clicked On Link" and "Opened Email Campaign". These options work in the following way:

- Email Address: If you wish to find an individual email address you can do so using this option. If you type in an entire email such as 'john@emailaddress.com' and there is a contact with these details you will be displayed a list containing only this contact. Searching only for 'john' will result in a list of all email addresses that contain the word 'john'. Lastly, if you want to find all the email addresses that are from a particular domain you can do so here by searching for something like '@emailaddress.com".
- Format: This option allows you to search for both HTML and Text based contacts, or either one individually.
- Confirmation Status: This option will search for contacts that are either confirmed or unconfirmed or both.
- Status: This is where you can search for contact by their activity status. This means you can search for all contacts, only active ones, only bounced ones or only unsubscribed email addresses. You can use this to locate contacts that have unsubscribed but wish to have their status activated again.
- Filter By Date: Here you can decide to limit your results by contacts that have subscribed before or after a date, even those that subscribed in between particular dates.
- Clicked On Link: If you have previously sent an email campaign out and tracked your link clicks you will be able to use this option to filter your contacts by those that have or have not clicked on the links found in your email campaigns.
- Opened Email Campaign: If you have previously sent out an email campaign and tracked opens you will be able to use this option to filter your contacts by those that have or have not opened a particular email campaign.

Filtering by your own Custom Fields
When you create your custom fields and gather information about your contacts through use of your subscription forms, modify details forms and importing lists you can then use this information to find particular segments of your contact base.
These options will only be displayed to you when you are searching a single contact list as the custom fields are based on individual contact lists and are not always available for all contact lists.
If you had created a Custom Field that was a check box that the contact could then save their favourite sports, you could then use the resulting data to filter your lists to show all contacts that like Soccer AND Cricket, or you could find all contacts that DO NOT like Soccer OR Cricket.
The more custom data you find out about your contacts the more specific you will be able to make your email campaings so as to send direct information about a topic that the contact is interested in rather then having to send an email that covers all topics.