Q: Turn off email search in finder search

I think I found a solution using Privacy of the Spotlight Preferences:

To prevent "Mail.app" from being indexed in Spotlight (not only in the quick search but also in Find window), the problem is that the Mail folder is hidden.

1. Open a Find window and "Go to Folder" (menu or Shift+Command+G): "~/Library/"

2. Open the Spotlight Preferences - Privacy

3. Drag the "Mail" folder in Finder to the Privacy area in Spotlight Preferences

That's all. It worked for me.

I am still in snow leaopard and the problem with this strategy is that you loose the ability to search within the mail application.

That is what I needed.

What do you need?

Search attachments but not email messages or the other way around?

Gabriel, I'm anxious to try that fix, but first please clarify your statement for me.

On April 22 you offered a fix for excluding mail from being included in regular searches.

Oxcart replied that then you lose the ability to search WITHIN the mail application.

Did you really mean (in your last post) that that's what you wanted? To give up the opportunity to search for a mail item WITHIN mail??

I think most of us want to still be able to search on mail WITHIN the mail application, we just don't want mail included in the results when we do general computer searches outside the mail application.

In other words, if I go Command-F and type in the word "taxes," I don't want 3400 emails to show up in the results; I'm not looking for an email, I'm looking for files on my computer that are about taxes. BUT if I recall that Aunt Bertha sent me an email stating the time her train arrives, and I want to find that email, I want to be able to open Mail and type "Bertha" into the MAIL search field and have it show me all the emails relating to Bertha.

Anyway, before I start screwing around and maybe messing things up, have you found a way to avoid emails from general searches but still be able to search on emails withing the Mail application? That is the question and I'm wondering if you could confirm whether or not you have achieved it (and how). I am guessing you might not have been precise in your last reply, as I don't think anyone would want to give up the ability to search for particular emails.

Thanks!

Please let me clarify:  To stop the finder searching in mail messages simply open the spotlight pane in the system preferences and uncheck the "mail messages"

The reason I was involved with this thread is that this does not stop the finder search returning hits to mail attachments.  It would not be so bad if it located attachments received, but it also locates attachments sent and if you sent the attachment to ten recipients then it locates ten copies of it. 

The only way to stop the finder search returning hits to mail attachments is to drag the mail folder into the privacy column.  This kills the ability to search from within the Mail program. 

If all mail attachments were stored in a single 'attachments' folder one could drag that to the privacy pane.  However, Mail spawns numerous attachment folders and it is tedious to drag them to the privacy pane.  Although this is what I do now and again to reduce the number of hits to attachments.

NB, this is in 10.6.  If I remember correctly, the situation is even worse in 10.8.  Although it may have been cured by now.  Some of the worst blunders have been silently fixed during upgrades but I have not followed closley as I am sticking to 10.6 until new hardware forces me on and up.

Thanks for this varjak. It makes the spotlight results usable for heavy email users.

The solution:

1. Turn off mail search in Spotlight preferences

2. open terminal

3. type this:

"sudo mdutil -E /"

(Spotlight reindex)

thats all!

UTTERLY USELESS! Big Apple fail on this one -- it doesn't work and its not easy.

None of these socalled solutions worked for me.

I still get hundreds of mail results whenever I am searching for a clients folder. I use 4 Macs and this abysmal state of affairs exists only on the Mac I upgraded to Mavericks.

Is there a simple button I can click in a preference pane to turn off mail results appearing in the Finder??

Or does anyone want to make a lot of money writing an Application that will provide this functionality?

Is there a simple way to upgrade to Mountain Lion from Mavericks?

If your computer shipped with mavericks there is probably no way to boot in ML because ML will not have the drivers for the particular hardware configuration.  If your computer shipped with ML and you upgraded to M, then it is possible to downgrade using a backup.  There is also a terminal solution which you can fine elsewhere on this site if you search.

Sorry for your troubles.  I will not upgrade from SL until my hardware fails or Mavericks gives me a 'search by file name' shortcut to circumvent the 3 operations on the dropdown menu currently required.  I sometimes wonder if the guys at Apple use their own products.

This solution works. Make the changes in Spotlight preferences and then re-index. Solves the problem!

SOLVED! Thanks to slipah

The solution:

1. Turn off mail search in Spotlight preferences

2. open terminal

3. type this:

"sudo mdutil -E /"

(Spotlight reindex)

thats all!

*NOT* solved!

See the third post from the original author on the first page.

We do not want to disable it for all of Spotlight (and thus potentially also in Mail itself!), but *just* when doing a Finder search as opposed to a system-wide or Mail.app search.  Think more like the opposit of  "Kind" + "is" to instead find "Kind" "is not" and being able to say email...

I agree. the simplest way for Apple to help here would be to add the "is not" condition globally to Spotlight search. "Kind is not Mail" would catch most problems, and "File Extension is not .olk" would solve it for Outlook for Mac users.

Using Outlook and I want emails to be searchable from Outlook but not Finder.

Moving "Microsoft User Data" out of Documents stops emails in Finder Search, but Outlook search doesn't work unless it's in Documents.  i've tried links and excluding from Spotlight, but can't get Finder to not search AND Outlook to search emails when in Documents. 

It's a conundrum and I mainly blame MICROSOFT.

So instead of fighting with MS over Documents folder I just surrendered it and moved my docs.  I created a folder MyDocs on Desktop so searching Desktop will find all my stuff but not email.