Help with iPhone spotlight search!!

[h4rk]

I hadn't needed the iPhone spotlight search to fetch information from a server until tonight. I was searching for an email that was not on my phone (because it was a few weeks old) but was on the server. The search came up with no matches but there was no button or anything to continue search on the server. When I typed the same search into gmail itself, the match came up right away. Is there a trick to getting the iPhone to do this because I believe I remember hearing that it was able to do this.