Colons and other special characters (exlamation-marks, question-marks, etc) break searches

Obviously the colon is a special character in the Lucene search syntax, but can we handle it better? For instance, search for 'javax.mail.NoSuchProviderException: smtp' and nothing is returned, search for 'javax.mail.NoSuchProviderException smtp' and you get a lot of valuable information.

I don't think we can expect users to know the difference. Can we strip colons from the end of words which are not recognised field names?

Please note that this issue can only be reproduced on full search. If searching for a page title with a colon in it using quick search the page title is found.