Index Gmail email with Spotlight?

[Gary King]

Is it possible at all to index Gmail email with Spotlight? On Windows, I use GDS, which I find useful because then I don't have to run Gmail just to find an email. I can do it through my web browser on Windows, which is always open.

I would like Spotlight to do the same, since GDS is not available for OS X.

 

[elbirth]

I don't know about an official way, but since gmail now supports POP (well, it has for a while) you should be able to set up Mail.app to get your gmail and get indexed that way. There's an option to keep a copy of your mail on gmail's server so it doesn't just save it to your computer like POP mail usually does.

 

[Gary King]

I don't know about an official way, but since gmail now supports POP (well, it has for a while) you should be able to set up Mail.app to get your gmail and get indexed that way. There's an option to keep a copy of your mail on gmail's server so it doesn't just save it to your computer like POP mail usually does.

I've tried going that route before, but Mail.app isn't good at downloading thousands of emails. I have about 15,000 email, and I tried this around August 2005, and I had to hit 'Check mail' once every 500 email or so. It wasn't very good, either, in that sometimes, I notice that some email didn't get downloaded.

It would be nice if Thunderbird was indexed by Spotlight.

 

[elbirth]

hmm, interesting... I don't use Mail so I wasn't aware of its limitation, sorry. But yeah, I wish Thunderbird was indexed as well

 

[plinkoman]

15,000 email??

i've never had any trouble with mail, but i've never had that many messages to dl

 

[treblah]

I've tried going that route before, but Mail.app isn't good at downloading thousands of emails. I have about 15,000 email, and I tried this around August 2005, and I had to hit 'Check mail' once every 500 email or so. It wasn't very good, either, in that sometimes, I notice that some email didn't get downloaded.

It would be nice if Thunderbird was indexed by Spotlight.

I forgot to backup Mail once when I was doing a clean install and you are right, Mail sucks at getting anymore than a few messages from Gmail. I only had 2,000 or so but quite a few had 5MB-10MB attachments and it took forever and failed 3 or 4 times along the way.