Spotlight in Finder problem

[mctavish]

I synced my Gmail account with Apple Mail and that seemed to go well. The synced Gmail messages are located in: /Users/Home/Library/Mail/IMAP-me@imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/All Mail.imapmbox/Messages.

Searching in Apple Mail seems to work well.

The odd thing is that when I search for the contents of any of the Gmail messages using Spotlight in Finder, the Gmail messages don’t show up. If I change the search from This Mac to “Mail” or to any of the subfolders of “Mail” in the path, the appropriate Gmail message(s) appear in the search results.

Does anyone know what is going on and how to fix it?

 

[JediMeister]

Try this for your ~/Library/Mail folder

 

[mctavish]

Thank you JediMeister.

Reindexing didn't work. I have done a number of other things including an OS reinstall.

I have found that if I search from Spotlight in the Desktop menu bar, the Gmail messages show up, so I guess that I should be happy. But, and this is weird, when I click "Show All," a Finder window opens and the message is question is there. And new searches from that window work just fine.

So I can have two identical appearing Finder windows, side by side, with identical search entries, but with very different search results. The other result that shows in the Finder window generated from the Desktop menu bar, but not in the Finder window opened from the Dock (or from elsewhere), is "Safari history item."

So why am I getting apparently complete search results from the menu bar Spotlight, but incomplete results from the Finder window search where "mail message" and "Safari history item" are omitted?

 

[mctavish]

There's more!

I tried it on my office computer. I don't have Gmail synced to my office Mac Apple Mail, and I don't want to, so I tried searches that would show in the search results as "Safari history item." Well, exactly the same thing happened as occurred on my home computer. When searching from the Desktop menu bar, the search worked well, but when searching from a Finder window opened by clicking on the Finder Dock icon, there were no entries of the kind "Safari history item."

So maybe it's an OS X bug, not fixable by users.

 

[GGJstudios]

I synced my Gmail account with Apple Mail and that seemed to go well. The synced Gmail messages are located in: /Users/Home/Library/Mail/IMAP-me@imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/All Mail.imapmbox/Messages.

Searching in Apple Mail seems to work well.

The odd thing is that when I search for the contents of any of the Gmail messages using Spotlight in Finder, the Gmail messages don’t show up. If I change the search from This Mac to “Mail” or to any of the subfolders of “Mail” in the path, the appropriate Gmail message(s) appear in the search results.

Does anyone know what is going on and how to fix it?

That's because you can't use Spotlight to search your Library folders. You can only use Finder to search those folders, and you have to be sure to include system files in your search. Reindexing won't change anything.

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[mctavish]

That's because you can't use Spotlight to search your Library folders. You can only use Finder to search those folders, and you have to be sure to include system files in your search. Reindexing won't change anything.

View attachment 270416​

That is very enlightening, GGJstudios, thank you. I had thought that the "+" settings only narrowed the search, not expanded it. Is there any setting that will search everything?

BQ

 

[GGJstudios]

That is very enlightening, GGJstudios, thank you. I had thought that the "+" settings only narrowed the search, not expanded it. Is there any setting that will search everything?

BQ

Not one setting, but you can add as many criteria as you want. Just keep clicking the + buttons to add criteria.

 

[mctavish]

I guess the attribute "Spotlight items" which includes mail as well as other items is the most appropriate for my search.

I would vote for a comprehensive search, feeling that I shouldn't have to know to add certain attributes - in this case System files or Spotlight items - to find what I'm looking for.

Thanks again for your help. I had no idea about these search considerations.