4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the conversations are presented to the requestor in an order determined in accordance with, for each respective conversation in the presented portion of the list, a date/time value of a most recently received message that is relevant to the search query.
1. A method for searching messages in a conversation-based message system, comprising: at a client computer, responding to receipt of a query from a requestor, the query having one or more query terms, including: transmitting the query over a network to a conversation management system; receiving from the conversation management system a list of conversations that match the one or more query terms, each of the conversations in the list having a respective conversation identifier, and wherein each conversation comprises one or more messages sharing a common set of characteristics that meet first predefined criteria and at least one conversation in the list of conversations comprises a plurality of messages; and presenting at least a portion of the list of conversations to the requestor, each conversation listed in the presented portion of the list being represented as a single item, the presented portion of the list including a plurality of items, each representing a distinct conversation, at least one of which comprises a plurality of messages, wherein each item representing a conversation having a plurality of messages has an associated icon indicating the number of electronic messages in the conversation.