Power Searching in Mail.app

[AllenKenya]

For years, I used Eudora (Mac) because it was fast and fit the way I needed and wanted to work. Overall, I still think it's the best e-mail program but I switched to Mail for some very specific reasons: I needed to be able to specify specific POP ports for specific e-mail accounts, I wanted to use the Mac OS centralized address book (Eudora's interface with Address Book was kludgy), I had apparently reached the limit on folders within Eudora as it would crash when I tried to add a new folder and restoring to previous preferences would allow me to use Eudora didn't fix the problem with adding a folder, and I wanted to see html e-mails (Mail still doesn't create html e-mails well).

Overall, I'm OK with Mail (v. 4.2, Mac OS 10.6.2, MacBook Pro late 2006 Core 2 Duo, 3gb RAM). The thing that I miss the most is Eudora's very robust searching capabilities. There may well be something I've missed with Mail as it seems that the kind of searches that I want to do should be possible in Mail. Here are some examples of the kinds of things I want:

1. Search on multiple criteria. For instance, find all e-mails where "From" contains xxxxx and "Date" is after xx/xx/xx and "Body" contains xxxxxxxx.

2. Boolean searches. For instance, find all e-mails where "From" contains xxxxx or "From" contains yyyyy.

3. Search within the results of a search. For instance, first find all e-mails where "From" contains xxxxx or "From" contains yyyyy, then within those e-mails, find e-mails where "Body" contains zzzzz.

4. Full boolean and/or grep searching (this would go beyond Eudora's capabilities).

Is there a resource, preferably online, for power searching in Mail? If so, where? While doing this kind of searching as native part of Mail would be preferable, I would be satisfied with a plug-in or even a third-party utility that interfaces well with Mail.

 

[mbestel]

Smart mailbox

Hi,

I am pretty sure that you can do most of what you want with a series of smart mailboxes.

From the Mailbox menu, select New Smart Mailbox and build up a query. Once that is done, a new mailbox icon will appear that dynamically applies your search criteria to the inbox and whatever else is specified.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Mark

 

[AllenKenya]

Re: Power Searching in Mail.app

Hi,

I am pretty sure that you can do most of what you want with a series of smart mailboxes.

Thanks, Mark. That would work especially well to search the results of a search. However, it seems rather kludgy to create a new smart mailbox every time I want to do a search more complicated than a single factor search. Most of the time I'm searching for a specific e-mail and it's a unique search that won't be repeated. (Of course, I suppose a lot of people would say that boolean or grep searches are rather kludgy.)

 

[miles01110]

Info is a little sketchy on their site, but PostBox is said to have fairly advanced search functions. I doubt they go so far as grep, though.