Q: Turn off email search in finder search
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Mar 14, 2011 8:42 AMby Francine Schwieder,If you are using Apple's Mail program, go to System Preferences->Spotlight and uncheck "Mail Messages" in the Search Results list (and anything else on that list whose results you don't need). If it is some other mail program, such as old Eudora mail, click the Privacy tab, then drag the folder containing the mail messages into the list of places you don't want searched.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder -
Mar 24, 2011 1:03 PMby DataChris,Looks like other people have the same problem....
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=13245179�
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=13157788� -
Mar 24, 2011 1:37 PMby DataChris,Apple PLEASE PLEASE give us a way to turn off (disable) email content in Finder search results. Spotlight/Mail preferences don't affect Finder search results, especially for those of us that use entourage/outlook.
I'm an advanced (and obsessively organized) user yet with every day/email it's getting increasingly difficult to actually find what I'm looking for. It's bad enough that I've had to manually edit Finder p.list settings just to be able to sort search results by size but with years worth of emails (and backups) on my computer searching for anything with the Finder has become truly futile. -
Mar 24, 2011 2:15 PMby varjak paw,Helpfulhttp://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
But are you aware that you can just exclude this folder:
~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/Main Identity 1/Data Records/Messages
in the Spotlight Privacy pane and stop your mail messages from appearing in a Finder search?
If you don't want Outlook events appearing either, also exclude this folder:
~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/Main Identity 1/Data Records/Events
Regards. -
Mar 28, 2011 6:57 AMby varjak paw,Thanks Dave, but the privacy setting exclusions does not change anything in my finder search results (only in spotlight results).
It does on my system. Finder searches are Spotlight, just with more options in the GUI than in the menu bar dropdown.Just discovered turning on privacy settings to exclude the email/outlook folders from spotlight disables search within email/outloo
Microsoft elected to use Spotlight searching on Outlook 2011, as does Mail, so if you turn it off, you turn it off everywhere.
I don't see this as a "nightmare" - you can always use a boolean to exclude messages from appearing in a search; see:
http://www.macworld.com/article/132788/2008/04/spotlight2.html
but you have the feedback page via which you can comment to Apple. Whether there is anything they could do to exclude results from third-party products I don't know.
Regards. -
Apr 8, 2011 3:29 AMby _roland_,Dave, the reason it is a nightmare is that you have to do this every single time you do a search. The convenient search box in finder becomes useless, spotlight becomes useless, because the only way to search what you are looking for is to create a complex boolean search phrase each time you set out to look for something. Every single time.
This in turn will slowly drive you to abandon spotlight altogether as a search mechanism, and adopt other ways to make your documents easier and quicker to find (the 3 decades old "well organized folders" method, as far as I am concerned)
This is a huge step backwards, and a steep price to pay, just for not being able to exclude outlook results from spotlight.
I will file this with Apple - this makes their great innovations in finding your documents easier utterly useless. -
Sep 28, 2011 8:39 PMby Gene Lewis,I love how DataChris' first question was never really addressed. DC - there's no solution to your problem. The solutions mentioned here highlight the problem that Apple has created - messages completely clutter my finder results and it drives me CRAZY. Mail messages contain references to nearly EVERYTHING - not sure why Apple doesn't understand this. Including Mail content in my searches renders them practically useless.
Apple - give users the option to exclude mail results in the finder. I know I speak for many users when I say that if I'm going to search for mail, I'll do it in Mail - not on my desktop.
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Oct 7, 2011 4:17 PMby lostonroute66,I had the same problem. Here's the solution I came up with. Actually it's a variation on a solution for a different, but related problem.
http://lostonroute66.com/solved-hiding-outlook-email-in-mac-os-x-finde
