Posts: 1,390
Threads: 237
Joined: Jan 2022
Request for help to do a test...
Mail has a search function that will supposedly scan a selected mailbox or all mailboxes, "to" "from" "subject" and "entire message". I've noticed that when I search for "entire message" it doesn't find any occurrences. I did rebuild Spotlight to no avail. Would someone please run a check on their machine to verify it does or doesn't work? TIA
Posts: 13,305
Threads: 2,485
Joined: May 2025
Seems to work fine for me.
Posts: 11,894
Threads: 520
Joined: Jan 2021
Reputation:
0
It appears to work for me
I pulled some obscure words (items from freecycle and others) that I knew were not in the subjects
Mail found three of three
Posts: 1,390
Threads: 237
Joined: Jan 2022
That's very interesting. I'm paranoid about protecting my data so I created an encrypted dmg containing folder "Mail" and "Mail Downloads" that are normally located in ~/Library. I set up symbolic links to these folders and placed these aliases in ~/Library which allows Mail to work normally. Should the MBP ever be stolen and login hacked or the HD swapped out my mail will be unreadable because it's encrypted. But having done this it now seems that Spotlight doesn't search in its index of the mounted dmg, hence the reason why Mail failed to search "entire message", although it does search "to" "from" and "subject". I think Spotlight had correctly indexed the dmg because when I temporarily reverted back to normal placement of library folders it immediately did an "entire message" search. I guess I'll have to live with this restricted search if I want to protect the data.
Posts: 1,705
Threads: 236
Joined: Feb 2024
Mine stopped doing it a week or two ago.. I posted here about it.
Rebooted the mac and it started working again.. go figure
