Search

This page helps you find something you wrote or received, in your notes, your mail or your Telegram and MAX messages, and give your agent the sources behind an answer. Every result names its source, so you can open the original and check it. An empty result means only that the local store has nothing that matches; the chat may not be downloaded or the folder not imported yet.

Ask your agent

Use memo CLI to find what was agreed about the Harbour budget, in my notes, mail and messages.
Quote the matching text, show the source of each result and tell me what you could not search.

Your agent picks the search, reads the matching text and shows you the sources. You can check each one with memo notes show or in the original app.

Choose where to search

Where it is	Command
You do not know	memo search all 'budget'
Your notes and files	memo search notes 'budget'
Your email	memo search mail 'budget'
Telegram or MAX messages	memo search messages 'budget'

search all looks in messages, mail and notes together. It does not search people, memories, projects or tasks; use memo context, memo search memories and memo tasks list for those. When you know where something is, its own search is better, because it understands more search words.

Search words

A search finds results that contain every word you type, including other forms of the word (meeting also finds meetings).

To find	Type
All of these words	budget venue
An exact phrase	"budget review"
One word or another	budget OR invoice
Without a word	budget NOT cancelled
With a tag	tag:follow-up
On a day, or from a day on	date:2026-10-08, date:[2026-09-01 TO *]
From or to someone (mail and messages)	from:kai, to:[email protected]
In the subject or a mail folder (mail)	subject:invoice, mailbox:important
Inside an attached file (messages and mail)	content:invoice, filename:*.pdf

content: narrows a search to the text of files and filename: to their names: memo search messages 'content:invoice'. A file's text is there once tg or max has read it (tg attachments extract) or an agent has written it.

Put the search in single quotes so the terminal passes it to Memo as it is: memo search notes '"budget review" NOT cancelled'. --exact matches words only as written.

Narrow down your notes

memo search notes 'budget' --filter 'tag:work'          # only notes with a tag
memo search notes 'budget' --source notes:2              # only one folder, by the id a hit shows
memo search notes 'budget type:internal'                 # only notes you wrote in Memo
memo search notes 'budget' --filter 'date:2026-10-08'    # and a second condition

type:file shows only notes from files. Results come 20 at a time; when there are more, --page 2 shows the next page, and the answer's page.next_page says which page that is.

Search mail

memo search mail 'from:kai subject:invoice'
memo search mail 'mailbox:important budget'
memo search mail 'budget' --account [email protected]

mailbox: finds a mail folder or a Gmail label, such as inbox, important or starred. Without --account, Memo searches every mail account. Text inside attachments is searched too (filename: and content:).

Search by meaning

With the search model on your computer, Memo also searches by meaning, so holiday can find a note about a vacation. tg or max downloads the model once:

tg models text download e5-small    # or: max models text download e5-small

The model runs on your computer. After the download, run memo sync so your notes are prepared for it. Each result says whether it was found by words, by meaning or both. Without the model, Memo says "Searched by words only" and still finds every note that contains the words.

What a result shows

For a note, a result shows the file and the first matching line. Below the results, Memo lists the notes and people that the results link to:

Projects/Budget.md
  # Budget review

Linked from these notes
  Kai Sample  (nobody by that name yet)  (1)

nobody by that name yet means the note links to a name that is not a known person in the local store yet. Add --json to get each result's reference, its links and how it was found.

Give your agent the sources

memo ask collects the sources for a question, so your agent can answer and cite them:

memo ask 'What is the Harbour budget?' 'Harbour budget' --all

The words after the question are what Memo searches for; without them, Memo searches for the whole question, and every word must match. --all searches every account; use --provider telegram --account 1 for one account. The answer lists each source with its reference and text, what was searched and whether anything was left out. Memo does not answer the question itself and does not save the answer.

Memo can also send the sources to an AI provider you set up and return its answer: add --analyze, and --allow-remote for a provider outside your computer. See configuration. The provider's answer is generated text: check it against the sources.

Next: see everything about one person, or turn what you found into a task.