Unsuccessful BNC word search

Dear friends, colleagues and list members,

 

I have two sentences from two separate newspaper articles:

 

The e-mail indicated that they were going scuba diving off the coast of Thailand.

 

The message indicated that they were going to be scuba diving off the coast of Thailand.

 

For the moment, though interesting, my concern is not with the change of tense. My problem is finding strings with 'e-mail'.  The BNC's 60 examples seem to be almost entirely from computer magazines (although I haven't checked David Lee's Index) and so discuss  functions of e-mail and similar and are of no use to me. My own small corpus only has this one instance; and of course, earlier corpora does not have this word.

 

Any advice would be very much appreciated and I wouldn't mind buying the corpus/corpora (providing it's within reason for a single researcher). My apologies for not keeping prior e-mails that discussed different corpora. In my certitude that the BNC would be all I needed, I deleted them (well, live and learn). 

 

Kindest regards (from Liverpool at the moment),

Linda

 

 

"Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind." John Donne