Searching through the thousands of emails on my laptop used to be easy with Snow Leopard. Within seconds I would search through entire messages, or who I sent to, or received from, or by subject. That simplicity seems to have been bleached out of Lion. Is anybody else having trouble with email search on Lion or is it just me?
Search is different in the new version but I think better. Type in your search word or phrase and notice that you'll see some finds drop down from the search box in real time. Select one of those. You'll now see some blue text in front of that criteria.
For example, I might want an email I received from Steve Jobs about the poker winnings he owes me. I'd type Jobs and lots of things would drop down including people with the name containing jobs, subjects that contain jobs, and message text that contains jobs. I select Steve Jobs. Now in the text box I'd see:
From: Steve Jobs
And the cursor is still in the search box. Now I type Poker and from the drop down list select Your Poker Winnings. Now in the search text box I'd see:
From: Steve Jobs Subject: Your Poker Winnings.
Over on the left side of the ToolBar I can still select where to search: Sent, All, InBox etc. If that hasn't winnowed the my list I can type in more search criteria.
That would be great, but when I do that it acts as an entire message search, so brings up all emails containing 'steve', but I wanted all emails from 'steve'
That's strange - when I type in: "from: Steve" <enter>, I get the attached (which is what I would think you are looking for?):
- robjohn
You're right, sorry I didn't notice that you'd said to actually type 'from:' before the name, which is a bit of a drag, but it works. Thank you
Also havin the same problem it use to work but now when i search it only finds people instead of sentences or words, is there any way to reinstall only the applications?
If you're trying to find sentences, in the Apple Mail upper right search field, type in the following:
message: "this is the sentence in quotes"
THEN HIT ENTER...
Best!
D.D.
funny, but it actually did stop working i use it all the time and noticed very quickly when it stoped.
I've been working on this for the better part of a month. I've tried every fix suggested here, plus about a dozen others from other threads. If you can think of it, I've tried it. The bottom line is this: For some users (not clear to Apple or to me which ones and why), search simply does not work the way it does for others. In my case, this means that there is absolutely no way to search the content of messages -- something I relied upon frequently prior to the Lion switch. (The from, to, and subject searches are also worse than SL, but at least they work to some degree.) So, for those of you struggling, and thinking you're going nuts because other people seem to be having results that you are not, hang in there. You are not alone. Cold comfort, I know.
The new Apple mail search is horrible, and I'm ready to switch to Thunderbird or something. The From: only seems to work if the person is in your address book. I've tried every suggestion (command line, and menu options) mentioned in threads, and still can't get it to work right. I'm staring right at the mail I want it to find, yet if I type any of the subject, from, message search terms in the box, it doesn't find it. I never had any issues in Snow Leopard, this is insane.
I'm (of course) presuming that you've tried typing:
message: stuff you're looking for
(whee stuff you're looking for is, of course, the stuff you're looking for :-))
and hitting <RETURN>?
Works for me but I sympathize if for some reason it doesn't work on your end...
Robjohn
Mhedstrom:
Did you hit <RETURN> after typing:
from: person you're looking for
?
It seems to make some sort of difference...
Best!
Robjohn
That apparently works, thanks! I don't remember having to do that before though, which is probably why I didn't try it. What happened to real time results? 🙂
Agreed, it is confusing and misleading that the real-time results are incomplete, that one has to hit return to see the full list. Bad. Probably a bug.
Another bug (or possibly a disastrous design flaw) is that suppose I search for Ted with from: Ted, hit enter and then get a list. Then I remember that Ted emailed me from another account, but signed his message Ted in the body of the text. Can I get both types of message - Ted in the body of the email OR in the sender? Not as far as I can see.
Changing the from: to any: (this says ENTIRE MESSAGE) via the pulldown menu attached to the from: blob finds nothing. Not messages with Ted in the body of the email (yes there definitely are some), nor in the from: field. Just typing Ted, hitting return = nothing. It's really really broken badly and SO inconvenient. Apple please fix it ASAP!!!
Did you try just typing in:
Ted
(with or without hitting <RETURN> afterwards)?
I think doing so does precisely what you're looking for (or perhaps MORE than what you're looking for) - showing "Ted" as it appears in all fields (from/to/message/subject)....
Of course, you can also type "Ted" and choose specifically the sub-category you're looking for from the suggestions that pop up below the search field...
Not the greatest implementation (I definitely prefer SL) but I believe gets the job done...
- Robjohn
Yes, I got 4 other emails listed at that point - none of them was either from: Ted nor containing the name Ted in emails from his other account. Hopeless.
Why not just type "Ted" and then select whatever "Ted" you're looking for from the suggestions that then appear? As far as I recall, there wasn't any better way of doing a "combined" search in SL (you still had to specify the subset of what you were looking for, just in advance)....
Best!
Robjohn
OS X Lion Mail - search feature
