Keep this checked.
Marco Arment’s (and my) “Entire Message” search in Mail.app hasn’t worked for a long time, always just inexplicably returning zero results for any search. Today it was finally causing enough of an inconvenience that he searched for a fix.
He learned that for “Entire Message” searches, Mail just uses Spotlight on the message files. So if you leave this box unchecked* in Spotlight’s preferences, “Entire Message” searches simply won’t work, and neither Mail nor Spotlight felt it necessary to tell him this. (You also need to ensure that ~/Library/Mail isn’t excluded from settings in that Privacy tab.)
He was impatient, so after fixing that setting, he told Spotlight to manually import the messages immediately:
mdimport ~/Library/Mail
As soon as that completed, “Entire Message” searches started working.
* he had unchecked it because mail messages always cluttered up the results when I was simply trying to launch an app or find a document.
This is annoying because I’m one of those people who disables and deletes as much of OS X as I can before it starts acting weird. Disabling spotlight searches was one of my ways to give the system a small speed increase, but I noticed the same problem too.
I’m sure one day a feature I depend on will be tied into the Dashboard, making it impossible for me to remove the dashboard code from my machine too.
Dec 4th, 2009 / 8:52 am
You mentioned using Spotlight to launch apps. Have you tried Quicksilver? It’s so much more than an app launcher, but that’s primarily what I use it for, and it stays out of the way. Very speedy, even on an old machine like my PowerBook G4.
Dec 4th, 2009 / 11:18 am
Same deal with search in iCal. Irked me for months until it finally dawned on me that spotlight might be more integrated to those apps.
Dec 4th, 2009 / 2:08 pm