A method for recovering information from electronic communications,
including conveying an indication of a topic of interest, from a searcher
on the topic, to a computing system storing a first set of the
communications of a first communicator, and searching within the first
set, in response to the indication, to identify one or more first
communications on the topic of interest, thereby defining a primary
sub-set of communications. The method further includes determining
identities of one or more second communicators who participated in the
primary sub-set, searching within a second set of the communications of
the one or more second communicators, in response to the indication, to
identify one or more second communications on the topic of interest,
thereby defining a secondary sub-set of communications, the second set of
the communications being stored in the computing system, and conveying
information from the searches to the searcher.