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Apple Mail, Searching is worse!

I thought Apple Mail searching for emails was suppused to be easier, so far it is worse!


I may be missing something and hope I am, but when I type a name of a person "Smith"....


...I cannot find/sort by sent?


...I cannot find/sort by Name


...I cannot find/sort by Subject


On occasion I see a blue highlighted: sort by Name, but that is about it.


It is really bad and worse than Office 2011 and worse than SL's Apple Mail.


Thx much for any help you can provide.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Aug 5, 2011 12:44 PM

Reply
81 replies

Aug 5, 2011 10:29 PM in response to Teela Brown

I'm having the same problem as the original poster. I tried waiting a few seconds for the appropriate suggestions, as Teela suggested. But it only seems to suggest people you've SENT a message to using this particular copy of Apple Mail. (Which I presume are stored in some internal "past recipients" list.) If someone has sent you hundreds of messages, or even if you've sent them hundreds of messages, it won't suggest their name (unless you've also sent them a message using this copy of Apple Mail). This is very annoying. It's like it's disregarding the message headers entirely when it searches.

Aug 6, 2011 7:39 PM in response to Steve Werner

Just tried rebuilding. Didn't fix the problem.


Not sure about the original poster, but I have an IMAP account with "Keep copies of messages for offline viewing" disabled. (For security reasons.) I also did a clean install of Lion, so Mail's "previous recipients" list is presumably empty. Not sure if doing any of these three things differently would solve the problem. ButI have good reasons for my current setup. So I guess I'll be dropping Apple Mail too, if this doesn't get solved.


Under Snow Leopard, I could search info in the mail headers (sender, recipient, subject), but not stuff in the message body (since, unlike the headers, the full messages weren't on my hard drive). I'm pretty sure I could search for recipients, even if I hadn't ever sent them a message using Apple Mail. Under Lion, the same functionality seems to be present. But I can only access it after I've sent a message to somebody once using my current Apple Mail installation. After that, their name shows up as a suggestion when I start to search for it, and when I select it, I can see all of the messages they've ever sent me. But until I send them a message for the first time using this copy of Apple Mail, their name will never be suggested,and my search will turn up blank, even if I can see several messages from themin the first screen of my inbox. Weird. Seems like the "name suggestions" feature of search relies on Apple Mail's internal list of previous recipients. (Sort of like the "name suggestion" feature when you were typing in a recipient's e-mail address always did.) This is unfortunate, as it's now the gatekeeper to header-based searches. (Or at least for searching the "sender" field. Doesn't seem to be any way for me to search the "subject" or "recipients" fields anymore.)


If this problem is in fact limited to people who have "keep messages for offline viewing" disabled, then I suspect this may be another case of Apple not really caring about people who do things differently than the way Steve Jobs intended.

Aug 7, 2011 5:42 AM in response to etresoft

Thx ET,


Yes, I would like to go back to Apple Mail :-) I must say the the constant "quitting" I got with Mail in Snow Leopard, no longer quits all the time and my attachments all seem to be getting to those I send to without any isues on OS X Lion Apple Mail :-)


Now it does appear to me and others, that searching is not as good as it was in SL and also as good as it is in Office/Outlook 2011.


I had to go back to outlook 2011 to find some emails, that I could not find in Apple Mail (Lion). Hopefully this will be an easy fix.

Aug 7, 2011 1:10 PM in response to fenderstratocaster

Just type a message/email and saved it. I think a saved message is supposed to go to the "Drafts" folder. Just put in the name/subject of the email and got NOTHING...no where to be found.


Also send it to myself the very same email and type in the name to the "subject" field and again got NOTHING...


Did the same thing on Outlook 2011 and both the "draft" and "sent" email were very easy to find.


Weird and hopefully this is on my end or maybe Apple needs to add feature #251, "Make Apple Mail Search Really Work" :-)

Aug 7, 2011 1:38 PM in response to etresoft

Etresoft, the message headers (containing the from, to, subject, and a handful of other fields) are always stored on your hard drive. The "keep messages offline" setting just determines whether or not the full message bodies (containing the message text and attachments) are also stored locally. Both Snow Leopard and Lion clearly contain the functionality to search headers, even when the bodies aren't also there. In Lion, it's just impossible to access this functionality until you've sent a message to somebody once using the current copy of Mail. At that point, Lion's version of Mail is perfectly happy to search the headers and turn up all the messages that person has ever sent you.


I'm not trying to search message bodies. I know that is (and always has) been impossible if they're not stored on your local machine. I'm just trying to search the headers, which are (and always have been) stored on your local machine.


PS I did not do a "standard migration" of Mail. I did a clean install of Lion, and then added my IMAP box to Apple Mail. Hence, my internal "previous recipients" list presumably started out blank. I know exactly which people I've sent messages to since moving to Lion, and those are the only people whose past messages can be seached for. Before you dismiss this as a nonstandard upgrade path, let me point out this is essentially the state a new Apple user would end up in (after buying their first Mac, firing up Lion, opening Apple Mail for the first time, and adding an IMAP box). Such users should not have to use Apple Mail to send messages to every person in their inbox before message search can find messages from these people. That's a strange design decision, if I ever saw one.

Apple Mail, Searching is worse!

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