Does anyone have any macros, scripts, or knowledge for searching a Mail mailbox (preferably the one current selected in the ton viewer)? Even when Spotlight indexing is working — and I have had a lot of trouble with this — including in past versions of OS-X mail search rarely seems to work for me. I want to see if I can search mailboxes outside of Mail and do something useful with the ones I have found. Looking at Mail’s AppleScript dictionary it doesn’t look promising.
Hey Mitchell,
Mail search is weird. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn’t.
There are basically 5 things to do:
Create a search-specific smart-mailbox that you can pop open and change as needed.
Go to the Finder and do a Spotlight search for email.
Use HoudahSpot to do an email search (there’s a template for this). I highly recommend HoudahSpot – it makes doing complex Spotlight searches much easer than does the native UI.
InfoClick (indexed-search) looks like it’s finally gotten worth the $15 dollars U.S.
Spend real money on MailSteward (I haven’t yet).
-Chris
Thanks.
ccstone https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/users/ccstone
September 2
Hey Mitchell,Mail search is weird. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't.
For sure.
There are basically 5 things to do:
Create a search-specific smart-mailbox that you can pop open and change as needed.
I have lots of smart mailboxes. I have never tried using one to search the body of messages. I will give that a try.
Go to the Finder and do a Spotlight search for email.
I think part of my problem might be screwed-up indexing of my Mail folders, though Mail search has nearly always failed me despite the state of Spotlight indexing.
Use HoudahSpot https://www.houdah.com/houdahSpot/?lang=en to do an email search (there's a template for this). I highly recommend HoudahSpot – it makes doing complex Spotlight searches much easer than does the native UI.
Love the program. It also supports storing your searches.
InfoClick https://nisus.com/InfoClick/ (indexed-search) looks like it's finally gotten worth the $15 dollars U.S.
Never heard of this — will take a look
Spend real money on MailSteward http://www.mailsteward.com/ (I haven't yet).
Likewise.
I miss Eudora :-).
Keep thinking I'd give Thunderbird a try but never have. Anyone have experience with that?
Hey Mitchell,
Hell yes! 
I wouldn't bother.
It does have some nice features, but it isn't scriptable – and I dislike the typography limitations.
It's strange that you would have constant search failures in Mail though. Try this:
-Chris
I bought a copy of InfoClick.
It’s not perfect, but for the money I’m not going to complain (much).
Since InfoClick creates its own index of your email it does not depend upon Spotlight and will consequently be more reliable.
I’m in the midst of writing a bunch of scripts to resize the search window and move the focus to various fields. (I will NOT post them here, unless there’s interest.)
I’ve also reported a few issues to Nisus Software and am encouraged by their responses.
-Chris
1 Like
Thanks @ccstone I have purchased Houdaspot, and InfoClick and will likely buy MailSteward after playing with the other apps more and seeing what version is the best. Thankfully in Ventura the search is much better but still not that great.
I would love to see your macros for InfoClick if you care to share them.
For me, I ideally would love to find a way to toggle filtering by a sender and then going back to my full list in Apple Mail. MailHub did this with a keystroke but it no longer works. You can right-click on a Sender and choose at the bottom "Search for..." but that requires a lot of mouse clicking to get in and out of. Perhaps something for a different thread.
I have been lamenting how frustrating it is to keep doing a similar search in Spotlight and setting up all my search parameters. The save search in Spotlight is not that user-friendly and retweakable. I love that you can do this in HoudahSpot and the results and paramaters are so much quicker and better. Thank you very much.
A search like this in Spotlight works well for me:
kind:mail from:[name in email address]
So that may look like
kind:mail from:maestro (because I get emails from maestro@example.com).
The Keyboard Maestro trick that helps me is that if I type kdmf in the Spotlight search field, I have a KM macro that converts that to kind:mail from: so I only have to enter the name I'm looking to search. (I have a number of text conversions for many Spotlight boolean operators I often use.)
I know many people haven't had good outcomes searching their Macs for emails, but I've consistently had good results searching with Spotlight. Don't know if it matters, but I always use Spotlight instead of Find in Mail (which, as I understand it, uses Spotlight), just because Spotlight is easier to access no matter what application is frontmost.
Thanks @NaOH nice to know how people work. I do have several text expansions setup but there are several subscriptions and other types of emails that I just quickly want to see all the emails from them and then toggle that off. I appreciate the examples you listed above that is helpful. I have been playing with InfoClick this morning after it finished indexing for 24 hours, is it fast and so much better at finding things then even in Ventura.