How to Use the Enron Database

Screenshot of the Interface

Message Search

Setting Constraints

Message search is the main search interface.  To do a search you must specify at least one constraint on the messages.  In the example for Constraint 1, you see drop down boxes that allow you to select different e-mail information fields, and to specify looking for items that do or do not contain some value.  Then there is a box for a search string.  The check box at the right lets you to restrict matches to whole words.  So this example is set to look for messages that have “lay” as a whole word in from “from” field.

Tip:  In the search string the wildcard character is a percent sign (%), so com% could match, come, communication, commotion, commitment, etc.  

To add additional content constraints click the “[+] Add constraint” link below the first constraint.    For example, you might want to find all e-mails from Ken Lay that mentioned “California” in the body of the message.  The only difference in setting these constraints is that you specify new constraints as “and” vs. “or” with respect to the previous one.

You can also restrict the date range of messages that are selected.  Do this by checking the “limit date between” box and setting the dates.

Once you have set the constraints how you want them, click the “retrieve” button.  After a short time your results will appear.  Please be patient as it is a big database.  If too many results appear, you can add constraints and search again, or specify a size for a random sample of the results.

Working with Messages

After you have set constraints and clicked the “retrieve” button, the results list appears below that button.  The header shows how many messages were found. 

You can click the message links (subject line of the message)  to look at the results and open individual messages. 

At the bottom of each message page is a button that says “tag.”  You can use this to annotate messages, and even search on this field.  This is a community feature so please use it carefully. 

There is also a way to add a message to a temporary list and link it to other messages.  If you want to use this feature please post a note on the support forum for instructions.

To download the current set of message for later analysis, import into other programs, etc., click the link in the “[Download Messages]” link in the header of the message list.  This will download a zip file to your computer containing the messages, one message per file. 

Top 151 Executive Search and People Search

The Top 151 search lets you search among the top 151 executives on a number of criteria.  Note that this only shows the “official” e-mail address of the person, and s/he may have other aliases in the dataset (you can check for this by searching the to or from fields for their last name)

People search does a simple string search (wildcard percent signs permitted) on anyone in a TO or FROM address in the database.

Names returned from both searches contain links that will automatically fill-in a constraint for that executive on the message search form.