Issue with search results for IMAP & POP accounts.

I have a client who recently moved her email from Entourage to Apple Mail under Mountain Lion. This client of mine has two email accounts - 1 POP and 1 IMAP. The issue she is having has to do with searching for email. Before I dive into the issue let me explain the two accounts that she uses for that will help add needed information to help solve this puzzle.

1) POP account - My client uses a pop account because she feels more comfortable with the way POP email is handled with some of the rules she has in place in Apple Mail. When the POP e-mail comes into Mail it hits a series of three rules.

Rules:

1) If Email was sent from someone who is listed in my Contacts.app (Address Book) but doesn't have the domain @gffeei.com (fyi -fake domain name used for this example) then move that email into a folder called Contacts (Located in On My Mac sidebar)

2) If Email is sent from domain @gffeei.com then move email into folder called GFFEEI email

3) If email is not sent from @gffeei.com and is not listed in Contacts.app then move message to a folder called Unknown

Using these three rules filters all incoming mail in to one of three side mailboxes.

2) IMAP account - My client likes to have a separate email account checking the same @gffeei.com on her iPhone and iPad. She likes this because it won't interfere with her POP email account that she only checks in Apple Mail.

The way I made this happen is to set up a separate email account called clientiphone@gffeei.com. All email sent to client@gffeei.com (the "pop" email above) is automatically forwarded (setting from the server - more like a copy is sent) to this account. This account is set up as an IMAP account on my client's iPhone and iPad as well as Apple Mail. Apple Mail is not applying the rules to this account so the email are not filtered into subfolders but instead is all collected in the Inbox in a mailbox called iPhone/iPad email.

I know many of you will tell me that there is a better solution of having ONE email account using IMAP and have the rules apply to that account. YOU are probably correct but there are some things beyond my control. So, that said, I am trying to work with the situation I am working with.

Now my issue:

Ok, you now have the background information you need. Here is the issue my client is having.

Remember, she has moved over to Apple Mail from Entourage. She is use to being in Entourage and searching for email based on criteria.

example: From: joe@smith, Subject: project 114

When she would search for this in Entourage it would pull up two (2) results of the same email (one from POP and one from IMAP). Entourage would find the email that was filtered into Contacts (POP) and the other that is located in Inbox iPhone/iPad (IMAP).

In Apple Mail when she does the search she doesn't have the same search criteria that she would in Entourage but I have trained her how to find email From then add Subject criteria. From there we tell Mail to search ALL of the email from both the IMAP and POP accounts and pull up results (which we would expect would contain duplicates). What we get is only IMAP results.

To confirm that there is actually an email that came into the POP account as well as the IMAP account, we browse and confirm both emails that I am searching for are there but the search results ONLY show the IMAP results. If I know the email is in the Contacts folder and tell Apple Mail to only search the Contacts folder it will display the result. As soon as I change the search to search "ALL" it changes to only display IMAP results.

Again, in Entourage when you searched all email the results would be IMAP and POP email. There would be a ton of duplicates (one for pop and one for imap). My theory is that Apple Mail skips the POP results because they are not listed in the INBOX but instead in on of the mailbox folders under "On My Mac" (Contacts, GFFEEI and Unknown). Weird.

Now, I thought I would get creative and create Smart Mailboxes to solve this issue. Here is what I did. I created a smart mailbox called All POP email and set the following criteria.

Contains messages that match any of the following conditions:

Message is in Mailbox Contacts

Message is in Mailbox GFFEEI

Message is in Mailbox Unknown

The smart mailbox seems to list all of the email from all three mailboxes.

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Then I created a new Smart Mailbox and called it All IMAP email and had the following conditions:

Contains messages that match any of the following conditions:

Message is in Mailbox iPhone/iPad (which is in the INBOX)

This seemed to work great.

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Finally, I tried doing a combo Smart Mailbox that included the following:

Contains messages that match any of the following conditions:

Message is in Mailbox All IMAP

Message is in Mailbox All POP

The results it pulls up is pretty much only IMAP email. There are sprinklings of POP email but not really. Very strange.

Love to hear from others to see if they have any ideas I can try to get the results my client it seeking - which is having search results of all her email (POP and IMAP) which would contain duplicates figuring it is the same email.

Thanks a ton!

- Brent