Spotlight AND EasyFind do not find my emails

Question

Hi and greetings from Germany (hope my English is ok).
I have been looking araound this forum for some hours today, finding that many, like me, have a problem with Spotlight finding data in Mail.app (yes, finding emails is enabled in SystemPrefs).
I had spotlight re-index my library folder which includes the mail folder. Didn't work. I did not try any of the hints that involve using the terminal. I'm not a seasoned techie and tend to avoid sofisticated interventions.
There were several in this forum who advised to use EasyFind instead. Well, I tried ... and failed.
My search was for a specific name which is in a number of differtent files, as well as in more than 100 emails.
Results (search all types of documents on the entire HD):
EasyFind 3.9 - 9 (nine) objects
Spotlight - 17 objects (including the 9 that EasyFind delivered)
Mail.app - 164 (of course only emails, not the other files).
Hmmm... strange.
I noticed, that in: <User/Library/Mail/Mailboxes> there is a folder <Mail> which lists all the folders/mailboxes I created in Mail.app and a folder <Mail.bmox> which contains only <info.plist>. The same is true for a number of folders (and sub-folders) in <Mail> - e. g. <Business> and <Business.mbox>, the latter containing only <info.plist> plus a folder <Messages> which is empty.
Hmmm... strange.
After quitting Mail.app and backing up the mail folder I manually moved the stuff from <Business> to <Business.mbox> and did so for other folders, too.
Started Mail and it found only the emails in the inbox, trash, sent (I think those were all). Restoring the backed up file and all seems to be as before.
What suprises me is that EasyFind finds far less than Spotlight and it, too does not find any emails.
Any ideas as to why this might be and how it could be solved? (While simple solutions would be preferred ANY advice is highly welcome!!!)
Thanks
Detlev

Answer 1

Good morning from Germany
To: Mike
Yes, EasyFind was instructed to search content. (The search took pretty long, too. There's almost 70 GB on my HD.) Upper/lower case is no issue either.
Messages folders do contain .emlx files - well, some of them do, as described before (some mailboxes have two folders: one with the mailbox name only plus one with a .mbox extention. If that is the case, those with an extention do not contain .emlx files, they are in the other one).
Now: for Spotlight you have really helped me!!! Via the menubar it does find all files and emails!!! Thank you greatly!!!! Strange thing though; doesn't seem logical to me to exclude then from the other search, but then... Anyway, thanks again!!!!!
I am still puzzled, however, about Easyfind not finding the emails. They are there.
PowerBook 15", 1.67 GHz   Mac OS X (10.4.8)