mac stuff

December 3
marco: Keep this checked. My “Entire Message” search in Mail.app hasn’t worked for a long time, always just inexplicably returning zero results for any search. Today it was finally causing enough of an inconvenience that I searched for a fix. I learned that for “Entire Message” searches, Mail just uses Spotlight on the message files. So if you leave this box unchecked (my reason for unchecking it in the first place was that mail messages always cluttered up the results when I was simply trying to launch an app or find a document), “Entire Message” searches simply won’t work, and neither Mail nor Spotlight felt it necessary to tell me this when I unchecked this box in Spotlight Preferences. (You also need to ensure that ~/Library/Mail isn’t excluded from settings in that Privacy tab.) I was impatient, so after fixing that setting, I told Spotlight to manually import the messages immediately: mdimport ~/Library/Mail As soon as that completed, “Entire Message” searches started working.

marco:

Keep this checked.

My “Entire Message” search in Mail.app hasn’t worked for a long time, always just inexplicably returning zero results for any search. Today it was finally causing enough of an inconvenience that I searched for a fix.

I learned that for “Entire Message” searches, Mail just uses Spotlight on the message files. So if you leave this box unchecked (my reason for unchecking it in the first place was that mail messages always cluttered up the results when I was simply trying to launch an app or find a document), “Entire Message” searches simply won’t work, and neither Mail nor Spotlight felt it necessary to tell me this when I unchecked this box in Spotlight Preferences. (You also need to ensure that ~/Library/Mail isn’t excluded from settings in that Privacy tab.)

I was impatient, so after fixing that setting, I told Spotlight to manually import the messages immediately:

mdimport ~/Library/Mail

As soon as that completed, “Entire Message” searches started working.