Thank you, I'll see if I can do this. However, because the other responder had issues understanding my issue, I've placed my response to them below as well in case you had trouble understanding my request even though you've already given me a suggestion on how to rectify it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Got it, I'll try to explain better. This is the actual base search: (index=email source=/var/logs/esa_0.log attachments=$file$ sha256=$hash$) OR (index=cyber source=/varlogs/fe01.log) (suser="$sender$" OR sender="$sender$") (duser="$recipient$" OR recipient="$recipient$") (subject="$subject$" OR msg="$subject$") (id="'<$email_id$>'" OR message-id="$email_id$") (ReplyAddress="$reply_add$" OR from-header="$reply_add$") If you look, you'll see the various fields I have setup to filter by: sender, recipient, subject, etc. Part of what I'm doing is actually consolidating email information from two different sourctypes. That's why I have the various filters being matched against the equalvalient field in the other sourcetype. For instance, in this part 'suser="$sender$" OR sender="$sender$" ', it'll filter out emails by sender, keeping only the events in both sourcetypes where the sender is somebody@gmail.com, for example. However, the default value for this field(and the rest) is a wildcard * to match everything, so even if I don't fill in a value to filter by, it'll default to that. As a result, the search becomes this ' suser="*" OR sender="*" ' at search time. You see the problem? With this kind of filter, it *requires* the suser or sender field to be present in the events lest they get filtered out, even though I'm not trying to filter by that. Now, in the case of fields like sender, recipient, subject, and even email_id, this is okay because *every* email has to have these fields. They're not optional. In the case of email attachments, however, that isn't the case. Not all emails have attachments, therefore not all events have an 'attachments' field. However, because the search ultimately defaults to this ' attachments=* ', it requires them. This is the problem. It makes it impossible to search for emails without attachments. Ideally, I'd love to be able to simply tell Splunk not to filter by that field at all unless I fill it with something that isn't a wildcard, but that doesn't appear to be possible. Does this clear up any confusion?
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