Spotlight AND EasyFind do not find my emails

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Level 1

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Spotlight AND EasyFind do not find my emails

Hi and greetings from Germany (hope my English is ok).

I have been looking araound this forum for some hours today, finding that many, like me, have a problem with Spotlight finding data in Mail.app (yes, finding emails is enabled in SystemPrefs).

I had spotlight re-index my library folder which includes the mail folder. Didn't work. I did not try any of the hints that involve using the terminal. I'm not a seasoned techie and tend to avoid sofisticated interventions.

There were several in this forum who advised to use EasyFind instead. Well, I tried ... and failed.

My search was for a specific name which is in a number of differtent files, as well as in more than 100 emails.
Results (search all types of documents on the entire HD):
EasyFind 3.9 - 9 (nine) objects
Spotlight - 17 objects (including the 9 that EasyFind delivered)
Mail.app - 164 (of course only emails, not the other files).

Hmmm... strange.

I noticed, that in: <User/Library/Mail/Mailboxes> there is a folder <Mail> which lists all the folders/mailboxes I created in Mail.app and a folder <Mail.bmox> which contains only <info.plist>. The same is true for a number of folders (and sub-folders) in <Mail> - e. g. <Business> and <Business.mbox>, the latter containing only <info.plist> plus a folder <Messages> which is empty.

Hmmm... strange.

After quitting Mail.app and backing up the mail folder I manually moved the stuff from <Business> to <Business.mbox> and did so for other folders, too.
Started Mail and it found only the emails in the inbox, trash, sent (I think those were all). Restoring the backed up file and all seems to be as before.

What suprises me is that EasyFind finds far less than Spotlight and it, too does not find any emails.

Any ideas as to why this might be and how it could be solved? (While simple solutions would be preferred ANY advice is highly welcome!!!)

Thanks
Detlev

PowerBook 15", 1.67 GHz, Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Jan 23, 2007 9:04 AM

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Answer 1

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Jan 23, 2007 9:59 AM in response to dete

Unless you have it set to search inside all files, I believe that EasyFind only searches inside certain file types known to be text files. I don't think that Mail files are on that list.

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Answer 2

dete Author

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Jan 23, 2007 10:18 AM in response to thomas_r.

Well, there is that icon in (my version) of EasyFind in the upper right corner, that looks like a light switch. It opens a kind of drawer where you can select an option that says something like . I had seleted that.

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Answer 3

Jan 23, 2007 2:41 PM in response to dete

In EasyFind, did you also have it set to search File Contents? (Note: This is where indexing is VERY good to have)

Your Messages folders shouldn't be empty. They should contain all of the messages in those folders as individual .emlx files.

When you searched with Spotlight, were you searching from the menubar or were you using Cmd-F or the Finder window. If the latter, that search purposely excludes email messages from the results. The menubar and Spotlight window accessed via the menubar's Show All should return email messages but Finder searches will not.

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Answer 4

dete Author

Level 1

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Jan 23, 2007 11:32 PM in response to Mike-N-nahyunil

Good morning from Germany

To: Mike

Yes, EasyFind was instructed to search content. (The search took pretty long, too. There's almost 70 GB on my HD.) Upper/lower case is no issue either.

Messages folders do contain .emlx files - well, some of them do, as described before ( some mailboxes have two folders: one with the mailbox name only plus one with a .mbox extention. If that is the case, those with an extention do not contain .emlx files, they are in the other one).

Now: for Spotlight you have really helped me!!! Via the menubar it does find all files and emails!!! Thank you greatly!!!! Strange thing though; doesn't seem logical to me to exclude then from the other search, but then... Anyway, thanks again!!!!!

I am still puzzled, however, about Easyfind not finding the emails. They are there.

PowerBook 15", 1.67 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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Answer 5

Jan 24, 2007 3:49 AM in response to dete

Just a question (as I had a similar problem) - do you have fast user switching turned on? I did, then I turned it off, re-booted and it worked again - could just be co-incidence though?

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Answer 6

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Jan 24, 2007 4:26 AM in response to dete

I just ran a quick test, setting EasyFind to scan all files and to look in the contents. I restricted its search to one of my mailbox folders to speed things up, and it did find the .emlx file containing the word I searched for. So I'm not sure why it didn't find them on yours. Perhaps you had it set to do a case-sensitive search and used a different case in the search field than in the messages?

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Answer 7

dete Author

Level 1

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Jan 24, 2007 7:39 AM in response to Craig Hockley

To Thomas:
Thanks for your effort...
As I mentioned before upper/lower case (case sensitivity) is not the issue, nontheless I changed the setting, and tried again (also with a capital letter at the begining) - no emails in the results.

To Craig:
Well, fast switching was enabled, no other user logged in, though. So I did what you suggested. EasyFind still ignores my emails.

By now I tried several words that are in the email content and sender or subject - it just will not show me emails.

So, what the heck, I'll use Spotlight, even if it should have occasional flaws. At least it doesn't ignore all my emails when I use it from the menubar.

Thanks a lot for all responses! 🙂
Detlev

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