More advanced mail search

How can I preform a more advanced email search by two or three criteria's. For example search for an email from [email protected] containing X within the email, with the subject containing Y?

Just ignore all the options and type the text you're searching for.

Similar Messages

Disable 'advanced' mail search

Since the new search implementation was introduced in Apple Mail, it takes many times longer to find mail. That's if I can find it at all because the reliability seems to be less. I'm presented with numerous options. Despite working through each option in turn I am often no longer able to retrieve the mail which I previously did in seconds.
Please make it stop! Does anyone know how to disable this 'advanced' search?!

Just ignore all the options and type the text you're searching for.

Archive folder missing from Mail & search not working

I've been having trouble getting the Archive mailbox to appear in Mail. What's worse, often the search function is broken, and Mail doesn't turn up any search results. I've found some ways to get the Archive folder to reappear, but these only seem to help temporarily. For instance, clicking on the gear at the bottom left and selecting "Get Account Info" then selecting the Archive folder causes it to reappear, but this is only temporary and it disappears after another restart or sometimes after an hour or two. The search not working is the worst, as it sometimes is working and sometimes isn't. I don't have any idea what's causing this, but I am at my wit's end because I NEED Mail to be firing on all cylinders.

Hello, and welcome to the Discussions.
What are your selections in Mail Preferences/Accounts/Advanced for this Gmail account, if using IMAP, regarding keeping message for Offline use? The Mail search can only access the list of messages to search Subject, From, etc, but not the entire message unless copies of all messages are being kept on the computer. This would be true for any IMAP account, btw.
More info, please.
Ernie

Mail search bar doesn't work

The title tells it all: the Search feature in Mail doesn't work. I can see dozens of messages to a various people, but the Search feature doesn't find any of them. How can I fix this?

captfred wrote:
Niku,
Highlight the mailbox you want to search on the left, or Inbox for all accounts. Enter a search criteria in the mail search window. At that point a small criteria bar opens just above the column titles and below the toolbar. It's easy to miss. This gives you more granular control of the search, such as "Entire Message, From, To, Subject etc." also "all mailboxes or Inbox".
If the search still fails, see if Spotlight will find the email. If not, than there is an indexing problem.
Whoops! I just noticed that I did something wrong, so before I proceed, I want to get your thoughts. What happened is that while using your advanced search method, I created six "Smart" Mailboxes. I don't know anything about "Smart" mailboxes, but before I delete them, I want to be sure that I won't forever lose all the messages now contained in them. In other words, how do I delete the "Smart" mailboxes while keeping all of the messages that are now in them?

Spotlight and mail searches not working, but...

I contacted Apple Support by phone and they had me go through all of the procedures to re-index the meta data and so on on my iMac and still my Spotlight and Mail searches are not working properly. (I cannot find certain files even though I know they exist...more often than not!) Supposedly, when I "forced" a re-index operation by going to Spotlight Preferences and changing Privacy settings for the entire hard disk and then changing them back, the Spotlight icon on the top right of the menubar was supposed to indicate that re-indexing was taking place, but that never happened. It seems that I possibly have a corrupt metadata file which just won't re-index, or some kind of permission changed which doesn't allow re-indexing to happen, or SOMETHING like that.
Is there a singular hidden "index" or metadata file on the Mac under Lion where this information is stored, can I get at it so I can trash it, and if I do, will the computer automatically rebuild a new index file (if such a singular file even exists)?
I asked this question at a semi-local Apple Store Genius Bar as well, and they were scratching their heads. I have not yet brought the machine in to the store --- if I can avoid that lengthy step, I'd much prefer to fix this here in my office. (The machine works fine otherwise, and I need it here all the time, it's just that searching doesn't work)
I have also tried a re-install over the existing OS (leaving all my apps and documents in place), but have not tried a complete erase-and-install installation. I have a complete Time Machine backup of the entire drive, but the question remains...if I use Apple Migration Assistant to bring the apps and documents back in from Time Machine after doing a "clean" install on a wiped-clean hard drive, won't Time Machine also restore the old metadata that I suspect is corrupt? If so, how would I go about restoring all of my apps and documents without the use of the Migration Assistant or the Time Machine backup file (which may contain a corrupt index file)? If I do a hard drive clone with one of the available utilities dedicated to that purpose, how do I restore JUST the things I need (including serial numbers, etc) without risk of bringing over "bad" index files?
By the way, this machine was running Snow Leopard for well over a year before I upgraded to Lion, with no searching problems whatsoever.
Thanks for any help that anyone might be able to provide. I know I ask a lot of questions, but I don't want to go through the lengthy cloning of my hard drive and then doing a "clean" install and then be saddled with the same problem again.

Hi Linc,
I was able to get some text to appear by choosing "All Messages" from the Error Log list. Here's what I got when i filtered "mdworker" (I have indicated where I removed repetitions):
3/14/12 9:24:10.617 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
failed to parse embedded CMap.
3/14/12 9:24:10.617 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
syntax error, unexpected DICTSTART.
[about a dozen instances of the above two lines were removed]
3/14/12 9:24:10.622 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
*** process 2211 exceeded 500 log message per second limit - remaining messages this second discarded ***
3/14/12 9:24:26.203 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
Range {0x0000, 0xFFFF} is not 1-dimensional; handling as a special case.
[Five instances of the above line were removed]
3/14/12 9:24:55.603 PM
mdworker
Unexpected EOF, returning last token as fallback
3/20/12 3:54:30.197 PM
mdworker32
kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
3/20/12 3:54:30.735 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
Range {0x0000, 0xFFFF} is not 1-dimensional; handling as a special case.
3/20/12 3:54:30.736 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
Range {0x0000, 0xFFFF} is not 1-dimensional; handling as a special case.
3/20/12 3:54:30.736 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
Range {0x0000, 0xFFFF} is not 1-dimensional; handling as a special case.
And here is what I got when I filtered using "mds" (since these are all at different times, I didn't remove duplicates):
3/14/12 9:35:35.672 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/14/12 10:45:54.051 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/14/12 11:45:55.907 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 12:45:53.271 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 1:45:52.702 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 2:45:52.837 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 3:45:52.046 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 4:45:51.586 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 5:45:51.996 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 6:45:52.049 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 7:45:51.647 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 8:46:05.149 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 1:27:56.526 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 2:25:20.942 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 3:26:14.623 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 4:26:06.091 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 5:26:29.923 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 9:48:38.902 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 10:15:02.995 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/16/12 7:55:44.632 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/16/12 8:07:28.002 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/16/12 4:28:06.236 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/16/12 4:31:05.891 PM
mds
(Error) LSOF: File '/Volumes/CAROLLE' (fd=15) left open on device 234881032
3/19/12 5:19:52.696 PM
mds
(Normal) FMW: FMW 0 0
3/19/12 5:19:52.704 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Root store set to FSOnly with matching create! (loaded:1)
3/19/12 5:19:59.291 PM
mds
(Warning) Server: No stores registered for metascope "kMDQueryScopeComputerIndexed"
3/19/12 5:20:31.340 PM
imagent
[Warning] Creating empty account: Default for service: IMDService (SubNet)
3/19/12 6:29:40.573 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/19/12 9:15:43.527 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/19/12 9:17:32.723 PM
mds
(Error) LSOF: File '/Volumes/CHUBER' (fd=22) left open on device 234881032
3/19/12 9:39:28.149 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/19/12 10:43:40.855 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 7:22:42.424 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 9:46:04.479 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 3:54:42.852 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 4:23:54.016 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 5:23:56.550 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 9:18:16.565 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
I hope some of this information is useful in solving my problem. Thanks in advance for your help!

Mail search can't find things

I've got a really nasty problem with searches in the Mail program in OS X Lion.
It used to be that I could search any term or string and the program would quickly find what I was looking for. I may have needed to click on the buttons to indicate whether the term should be in the subject, entire message, etc.
With the new version of Mail, the program seldom finds anything. The search refinement buttons usually aren't there anymore, and they only come up as I type and the program guesses where to look. However, most of the time they don't come up at all, and the search function finds nothing, even though I know the term is in my mail.
There seem to be no settings for dealing with this problem in Mail, and this is really going to make my life miserable, since I have to search many times daily.
Does anyone know a way to fix this?
Jamie

My take is that Mail now only searches on subject lines and From addresses, as indicated by the popup selections upon entering some search text. This would be a terrible retraction of capability for a putatively more advanced system. For all the twitterific garbage, to lose this would be cataclysmic.

Mail Search Methodology Help

i am doing a little reading after having done a lot of "experimenting" with search in Mac Mail and i think i am still missing something.
i put my search terms in the top right and they autocomplete with (apparently) suggestions for "FROM" and "SUBJECTS".
1. are there other options such as /content/ or some other search criteria that i can use here?
2. is there a way to get into a Finder window such as i do in Spotlight when i pull up "Show in Finder"?
3. is there a way to do this search in finder so that it gets exactly the same (more?) results?
how do i determine WHERE i am searching? i have about ten email accounts and fifty folders (and a gajillion emails) in the On My Mac section.
4. is there a way to search /everything/? i mean, i so see that i have "Search:" - "Inbox" "Drafts" "Sent" "Notes" and "Flagged" showing on the top LEFT side? but HOW IS THIS SELECTED? is it selected? if i click on the TRASH FOLDER northing is selected on the top LEFT but is it only searching the Trash at this point?
5. if i click on "Sent" i see that "Sent" is selected on the top left and i assume (?) it is only searching Sent folder at this point?? what about if i click on or some random folder in the ON MY MAC SECTION? i mean, i /cannot/ select the "ON MY MAC" title because it is greyed out and at one point i thought i saw something like "On My Mac" or whatever suddenly pop up on the top left when i selected some random folder but am i searching this folder or am i searching all of the On My Mac section?
i am uber (like totally) confused by this UI at this point and i am suddenly realizing why i am having so much trouble. this is because i am clueless as to how this tool is working.
THANKS in any advance for any edification or at least for clearing some of the smog/fog from in front of my face.

1. It will only offer categories where the search term appears. If you spotlight index is flaky, you might not be seeing some options. I think a lot of people get really frustrated with the search function when their Spotlight index is not complete. You can use header names and such in the search by typing the header, colon, then search term. E.g. "subject: lunch" It likes lower case for tokens, and you need to put a space after the colon.
2. & 3. Not that I know of. However, you could go into the Finder, navigate into your Library/Mail/V2 folder and Cmd-F. Then you will be searching in the Mail folder (depending on your Search prefs in Finder). It will find messages and attachments.
4. The search location should be indicated (highlighted) in the favorites bar. I think it defaults to All, but you can choose any of the other things you have in the Favorites bar. However, it may switch to All if it can't find anything in the selected mailbox.
5. From what I can tell, if you select a folder in the ON MY MAC list, it will stop searching. You have to use the things you have in Favorites bar, but see the item in help about searching a mailbox.
I think the Help gives some good info:
Search messages
You can quickly search messages to find specific text, messages to or from contacts, attachments, or more. You can search messages in all mailboxes or specific mailboxes, and save searches to use again.
In the Search field in the Mail toolbar, start typing your search text.A list of suggestions appears under the Search field, and the Search bar appears in the toolbar.
Suggestions are organized into categories and depend on your search text. They might include “Message contains:,” People, Subjects (includes the subject field and instances of the text you typed), Status (if you typed a status like “unread” or “flagged”), Mailboxes (if you typed the name of a mailbox), Attachments, or Dates.
The Search bar highlights the mailbox being searched. For example, All, Inbox, or another mailbox.
Select a suggestion.The suggestion appears as a token in the Search field. For example, the suggestion Entire Message, which includes the address fields and the subject line, is shown as Any in the Search field.Mail also lists any messages from the highlighted mailbox that match the token. If there are no matches, Mail displays a “Search all mailboxes” suggestion that you can select to widen your search.
If needed, change your search to vary the results:
Search a specific mailbox:
Click a mailbox in the Search bar. To search a mailbox that’s not shown, start typing a mailbox name in the search field.
Search several mailboxes at once:
To search mailboxes that aren’t shown, start typing a mailbox name in the search field, choose the “Message contains:” suggestion, and then choose Mailbox from the token’s pop-up menu. Repeat for each mailbox. Or select the mailboxes in the sidebar before starting your search, and then click Selected Mailboxes in the Favorites bar.
Change a token’s focus:
Click the token’s arrow to display a pop-up menu of options, or select the token and press Option-Tab until you see the option you want. For example, if you chose a suggestion from the People category, you can change the focus to search for messages to or from that person, or search entire messages for that person.
Quickly create a token:
Type the name of a message header field, followed by a colon and a value. For example, type “from: susan park” and press Enter to create the From token and list messages from Susan. Or type “subject: lunch” and press Enter to create the Subject token and list messages with “lunch” in the subject.
Use multiple tokens:
After a token, start typing search text, and then choose a suggestion. Repeat for each item you want to search for. The search field scrolls as you add more tokens. Mail searches for messages that match all of the tokens; the more tokens you use, the narrower the search.
Use Boolean searches:
You can use Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT. For example, to search for messages that contain “yosemite” and “yellowstone” but not “teton,” type “yosemite AND yellowstone NOT teton” or “yosemite AND yellowstone -teton.” You must type Boolean operators in uppercase.
Save a search:
Click Save in the Search bar to save a search as a Smart Mailbox.
If you use the Any token or search in all mailboxes, Mail finds messages containing words that have the same prefix, or the same beginning letters, as any of the words you typed in the Search field. The words can be in any order. For example, if you type “box” in the Search field, the results will include “boxcar” but not “mailbox.”
To include the Trash and Junk mailboxes, and encrypted messages, when you search all mailboxes, choose Mail > Preferences, and then click General.
For best search results for Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Exchange accounts, make sure the “Keep copies of messages for offline viewing” option is set to “All messages and their attachments” on the Advanced pane in Mail account preferences.

Apple Mail Search is acting strange

Hello.
I have been having some major issue with Apple Mail (6.5) in its search function.
I have been a heavy user of Apple Mail (over 15,000 emails on the program- and archived every year) for many years, and never had this issue.
When I search for a key word it does not find it! I noticed that this not to work on emails in my In Box or Sent Boxes (Gmail email POP). If I move a specific email to a newly created folder On My Mac and then search, the keyword will be found in the email in that new folder- but never on the orignal Inbox or Sent Box! Also, the search works fine for senders of emails (by name) if I search for them.
The issue is mainly in finding a key word in the content of an email and particurly in the In and Sent boxes!
I tried EVERYTHING I could find online from reindenxing the whole Macintosh HD, deleting Envelope Files... I even deleted Apple Mail and then reinstalled it from Mountain Lion DVD! STILL same issue.
To test things, I exported Mailboxes to another Macbook Air I have (brand new) and then imported these mailboxes into the correct location (Inbox, Sent...etc), and the search there worked fine!
ANY IDEAS, as this is frustrating and I am seriously considering switching to new email client after all these years.
Thanks,

The mail search uses Spotlight to find results, so your problem may be more of a corrupted Spotlight index. To recreate your Spotlight index, go to System Preferences->Spotlight, click the Privacy tab at the top, and add your Boot drive here (usually Macintosh HD). Close and re-open this preference page and then remove the Macintosh HD from the privacy tab.
Within about 30 seconds, you should notice the Spotlight magnifying glass icon in the top menu bar will say it is indexing, and it may take about 15+ minutes to complete. Hopefully that will return your missing search results in the Mail.app.

Mail search no longer looks past last 30 days or so

Using the search function in the same manner as ever, the results no longer go back further than early July (today is the 31th).
This also affects the Smart Mailboxes, which sort out client mail, etc.
Restarting does nothing. Mailbox rebuild option is grayed out.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Eric D.

Eric,
I do not experience this, and Mail Search is working normally.
What type of account are you using -- POP, IMAP or .mac?
If you have two or more accounts, then Rebuild will not be available until you click on the black triangle beside each standard Icon section to reveal, for example, the Inbox for each separate account.
More info, please.
Ernie

Mail search not working mavericks

Mail search function is not working in any of my mail accounts...gmail, godaddy hosted domain or icloud.
Tried deleting envelope index files and re-index...still doesn't work. Bummer to have brand new 15" retina mbp all in at $3800 and have these type of issues.

This fix worked for me:
Mail uses Spotlight for search results, so you may want to rebuild the Spotlight index. I tried to just rebuild the mail index first but no success. Rebuilding the entire hard drive did the trick.
Note you can rebuilding Mail's spotlight index by going to the Spotlight system preferences, dragging your hard drive to the privacy pane, waiting 10 seconds, and then removing it. Re-indexing your drive may take an hour or more.

[bug locked] Is the OCR capability of Adobe Acrobat Version 9 more advanced?

Hi
The OCR of Adobe Acrobat Version 7 is not yielding satisfactory results, especially on numerical figures.
Is the OCR capability of Adobe Acrobat Version 9 more advanced? If yes, can you suggest where I can read more about the extended OCR facilities provided?
Thank you for your assistance in that matter.
Ashvin

It /could be/. What a strange way to ask a question. You could always grab
the trial and see for yourself. If you install the trial; be sure to remove
version 8 entirely first.
Please note: I read this Forums through e-mail. If you respond to me; please
quote, otherwise I have no idea whom your response is addressed to or the
context. This is all thanks to how this forum doesn't work properly, yet.
Regards,
S.D.A. (Stephen)

Mail search not finding existing items

The simple Mail Search tool finds many things in the mailboxes, but misses more and more. When a search is being done within a given mailbox or folder, the search expands (sometimes unreliably) to go through all mailboxes/folders, when this was not desired.
Is the indexing not working? How can this be checked?
What are limits of indexing (number of messages, etc.)?
Mail is open for many hours/day, so time should be available.
Entire Mail Folder is now over 1.3 GB, too big to handle?

I had the same problem but rebuilding spotlight's index fixed the problem. I followed the instructions at
http://www.macobserver.com/tip/2006/07/21.1.shtml
Or Onyx can be used...

Advanced Keyword Searches (for data on ftp)

Does anyone happen to know if running an Advanced Google Search will turn up data in the Public folder on my website that is not otherwise linked to my website? I have a couple of websites and I am trying to make sure I understand what is publicly available, what can be "scoured" and downloaded and how careful I really have to be with this.
I also have a Wordpress Blog that allows for a PASSWORD PROTECTED post but I was not able to find out from their help forum if the Images that were uploaded as part of this post, or the pdf's that were linked to in this post - are in fact available via an Advanced Google Search. Since I upload the pdf's and the images to a Public folder on the site I assume this is the case.
If so, I'd love to make sure I know how easy it would be for someone to download /all/ of this information.
THANKS for any tips on this topic.

888442 wrote:
Hi,
We have an existing setup of physical standby database on 11.1.0.7 on Linux (primary 2 node rac)
Now, the customer has bought licence for Advance compression and we want leverage this in our standby setup.
The existing parameter what we have is
log_archive_dest_2 =SERVICE=STDBY_SWPRDENT ARCH ASYNC VALID_FOR=(ONLINE_LOGFILES,PRIMARY_ROLE) DB_UNIQUE_NAME=STDBY01 NET_TIMEOUT=60
what changes do i need to change this for advance compression option.Some more reference, Check this manual
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28294/log_arch_dest_param.htm#BABBFBDI
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28294/log_transport.htm

Mac mail search function is not working. Any search term returns all records.

Mac mail search function is not working. Any search term returns all records.

hi eric. many thanks.
i will have to read these links closer but what i meant to say is that the hard drive space that was being taken up seemed like it suddenly jumped way up because i had just gotten through a process in the last month where i am storing all my My Documents data on my Mac Pro. i am doing this in order to decide whether i should just keep it ALL on my Mac Pro and use ChronoSync to sync /some/ of it to my MBP.
so if i look in the Documents folder on my Mac Pro i have a ton of folders that i have created with a ton of data. if i look in the Documents folder on my MBP there are NO folders that have data in them that i created. there are other folders such as folders that various software created but what i mean to point out is that there was a LOT of available space on my HD until recently.
i am wondering if there is some way that running the Mail re-index (it then ran some kind of "Importing" routine) or by syncing my Photostream to the MBP caused a huge jump in data on this drive. if it is the photostream sync i can just take this off or see if it will sync more selectively. if it is something to do with mac mail jumping in size i am not sure why this would happen or what to do about it.
does that question make sense?
i mean, before i did these two operations my recollection is that i would have had 130 GB on the hard drive (really just guessing here) and now there is like 218 GB on the hard drive and i don't know where all this came from...

Apple mail search is flaky

all of a sudden when i search a name or key word in mail, it often does not find it. is there any way to reset without deleting the application and losing all mail in inbox, sent, etc.?

The mail search uses Spotlight to find results, so your problem may be more of a corrupted Spotlight index. To recreate your Spotlight index, go to System Preferences->Spotlight, click the Privacy tab at the top, and add your Boot drive here (usually Macintosh HD). Close and re-open this preference page and then remove the Macintosh HD from the privacy tab.
Within about 30 seconds, you should notice the Spotlight magnifying glass icon in the top menu bar will say it is indexing, and it may take about 15+ minutes to complete. Hopefully that will return your missing search results in the Mail.app.

More advanced mail search

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for