Spotlight, mail.app & symlinks?

couple of questions ...
(1) i know Mail.app uses 'spotlight technology' to search messages -- including those sync'd locally from IMAP servers for IMAP use.
does spotlight indexing itself -- in the SystemPrefs pane -- need to be turned on? or, does Mail.app handle its own searching independent of the 'global' Spotlight engine/process?
(2) i've moved ~/Library/Mail to a separate partition from my "/" (e.g., to /Volumes/Data/Mail"), and have symlinked it back so that Mail.app can find it. i.e.,
ln -sf /Volumes/Data/Mail ~/Library/Mail
works like a champ.
if i want Mail.app's spotlight search capability to find/index those files, do I have to tell Spotlight to search in /Volumes/Data/Mail? Or will spotlight (either global, or mail.app-specific) follow the symlink?
my goals are to
(a) have Mail.app find/ssearch those files
(b) not index "everything, everywhere" just to get searchable mail
(c) avoid double-counting messages, e.g. along both the /Volumes/Data/Mail & ~/Library/Mail paths.
any thoughts/suggestions?
thanks.

If you have a backup I would recommend a clean install

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Spotlight, Mail app and Entourage

I was using spotlight today to try and find info ("this.x" inside a Javascript inside a .qtz file). Interestingly Entourage (which i rarely use) generated a hit for an email message where Mail app did not. Searching inside Mail app itself found the message (both apps accessing the same Gmail account containing message with said token).
Anybody know why. Spotlight is non-determanistic I am told be even so…
Should I make this a feature request. Is 10.5 even being updated for non-essential bugs any more?

And in the end it was sooooo easy!
ALL here: http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage/browse_thre ad/thread/af9fe26311baa3ee/050059cb37d9cf9b?q=spotlight&lnk=nl&
I really only dropped the missing files (two) into the Spotlight Folder at Library ….. for me it worked like a charm.
The missing files http://www.entourage.mvps.org/downloads/Spotlight.zip
On 8/15/07 9:54 PM, in article  C2E90A91.D269%[email protected], "Diane Ross"
<[email protected]> wrote:
I have uploaded the files that belong in Library --> Spotlight folder for
downloading. I found that you had to use "Remove Office" then apply the
11.3.5 updater then 11.3.6 then 11.3.7. I believe that you can just drop in
the missing file into Spotlight folder and you'll get the preference in
Entourage to enable Spotlight without having to go through the entire
process of starting over.
"http://www.entourage.mvps.org/downloads/Spotlight.zip"
If it doesn't work, then you haven't spent much effort in trying.

How can I "archive" mails in Mail App to another internal drive/partition to save space but still have it searchable in spotlight (and preferably visible, searchable, draggable in Mail App)?

How can I "archive" mails in Mail App to another internal drive/partition to save space but still have it searchable in spotlight (and preferably visible, searchable, draggable in Mail App)?
Background:
I am using Mountain Lion and Mail App and running out of space on my small primary SSD drive (where I keep OS, apps, key user preferences/data and mail for speed). The mail data is the big variable (many GBs) and I want to "archive"/move some of the old mail to my 2nd drive inside the Mac. But I still want it searchable inside spotlight and preferably even inside Mail too. And I'd like to be able to still drag and drop old mails into this archive folder.
What I've tried that seems to work:
This seemed to work:
1. Move the archive folder/mailbox to the 2nd drive/partition/folder (don't delete anything inside Mail App)
2. Create a symbolic link from its new location to the original/old location
This seems to work, it looks as "normal" and as if nothing happened inside Mail App but the folder now resides elsewhere and seems searchable etc. But I'm not sure that once caches refresh or over time with updates etc if stuff will break horribly or corrupt.
Is that the right way to "archive" mails in Mail App to another internal drive/partition to save space but still have it searchable in spotlight and visible, searchable, draggable in Mail App?
Thanks in advance!
Cheers,
Daniel

I'm having a similar but slightly different problem. My company just migrated to Gmail, and it's saving mail drafts every 30 seconds into my Trash folder.
I unchecked the "Show in IMAP" preference in the Gmail settings, but my Drafts folder completely disappeared. I went back and checked it and the folder reappeared (with my drafts still in there).
I like the idea if starting an email on my laptop and having the option of finishing it on my iPhone or iPad, so only saving Drafts locally would not be ideal.

Password protecting mail app and permanent deletion of emails so they don't appear in spotlight search

I realise that there is a temporary way to prevent this happening by unticking the 'mail' option in the spotlight search settings menu, but how do you permanently delete the emails? I assumed that when I hit delete then emptied the trash box, the mails were gone for good. But finding that they remain stored in some hidden place and can be easily accessed is very annoying! In fact, finding that other users can quickly change the settings back and have free access to my email is rather disturbing anyway, especially as there is no way to password protect my email account once i activate the mail app. the apple mail app is linked to my yahoo account, but within yahoo mail there seems to be no problem in regards to deleted mail being stored somewhere else, only within the apple app system.
So i guess id like to know, is there some way to password protect my account or do I just need to keep deleting my account before lending the ipad to someone else and then reinstating it? And is there any way to properly delete emails for good?
I would be happy just to go without the mail app and log in directly through yahoo in Safari, except that I find the notification alert when I receive a new mail very handy!!

[edit] I dragged the email I sent through the MBP Mail app (under MAILBOXES > Sent > Yahoo!) to the highlighted Sent folder (YAHOO! > Sent), and now it shows up on all Yahoo Sent folders (iPad app, web browser, phone app). Not entirely solved the issue but will use web browser to sent future emails to keep everything in sync.

Spotlight SOMETIMES searches mail, but mail.app shows no results

Hi folks,
I've been anxiously waiting for the Mavericks release, hoping it would, once-and-for-all, fix this aggravating issue I've had with spotlight mail searches.
I recently carried out a full wipe-and-reinstall on my iMac, by creating a bootable clone of my main desktop, then booting from that drive and using disk utility to erase my main hard drive, and selecting that drive in the Mavericks installer. This means that I had a 100% pristine installation of Mavericks - no old preferences, no old settings, no weird filesystem permissions issues, and yet this problem STILL persists.
I have three different Gmail email accounts, all connected via IMAP, and all saving the emails locally for offline viewing (although I don't believe this is an option anymore in Mavericks). When I first added these accounts to Mail.app, I was unable to search them either in Spotlight or in Mail.app.
I have since undergone multiple attempts to fix it, and occasionally during the process Spotlight has worked(although it shows multiple historical versions of sent mails due to auto-save), but searching from within Mail.app remained broken no matter what I did.
These are the things I've tried:
running 'mdimport -r /Library/Spotlight/Mail.mdimporter'
adding and removing ~/Library/Mail to the spotlight 'do not index these files' privacy setting
adding and removing the entire hard drive to the 'do not index' list
using 'mdutil -E' to erase and rebuild the index
manually removing the Envelope Index files from ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData, then re-launching mail to force it to rebuild the index
using the menus within mail to rebuild the mailboxes
This has been broken for several versions of Mac OS, and it's obscene that there hasn't been any progress on the issue. Please tell me that somebody has some new ideas that I haven't tried yet - I've been struggling with this headache literally for YEARS, and it has really soured me on an otherwise excellent Apple experience.

I finally figured it out!
The trick was that I had some old versions of Mail.app in an archived folder, and these versions were screwing up spotlight, even though they haven't been run in years. Removing the old versions, then updating the spotlight index and rebuilding the Envelope Index files seems to have fixed my search.
For others who, like me, have spent YEARS of constantly re-indexing things to fix it - there is an odd quirk in the way OS X associates files, where it seeks out Applications anywhere on your computer (including external hard drives), and the presence of those Applications can mess things up even if you aren't running them. This seems to be rarely discussed in proposed solutions, but it was absolutely the fix for me.

How I solved issues with Mail.app and Spotlight

Even though my upgrade from Tiger 10.4.10 to Leopard was painless, the new OS X did have a few issues that had bothered me:
*Mail.app: * Every now and then, the app would behave like on its first startup, saying it needs to import my mail before I can work with it. What's more, at times I've had the phenomen that messages would appear empty on the preview pane and sometimes even when being opened.
*Spotlight: * Even though I let the indexing finish on the first day of working under Leopard, every now and then it seemed to start all over. First, I thought it's the NAS being indexed but it just went on to restart indexing each time I thought I had let it finish.
*Free disk space: * I tried to bring the usage of my homedirectory down so I would have enough free disk space to switch FileVault off and then back on so I could start using TimeMachine. But whatever I did, the free disk space just wouuldn't inrease - it just stayed the same (yes, I did let the system recover space on shutdown).
The *free disk space* issue made me think there was a problem with my disk but repeated runs with the Disk Utility yielded nothing...not for about a month. Yesterday I got some warnings about 'damaged but not repaired' but according to an Apple doc those could be safely ignored.
Somebody suggested to apply the combo update for 10.5.1 as that could solve some issues so I went ahead - after all, the update had already been applied earlier so just re-installing wouldn't hurt much, right?
Wrong.
The install of the combo update went smoothly, FileVault recovered some space on shutdown but upon restart I couldn't log in anymore: My homedirectory was damaged. The friendly OS X Leopard offered to repair it but soon later reported back that it failed doing so.
Now, to cut a long story short - deleting the affected user's account and using a different user on the same machine (without FileVault) solved any issues I've had. Mail now works like a charm (despite 40k+ messages with attachments), spotlight doesn't restart all it's indexing and disk space is shown correctly again. Also the odd corrupt file copy I had experienced occasionally (especially with large files) was gone.
My advise to anyone who didn't de-activate FileVault under Tiger to make the switch to Leopard: Even if you think it worked, switch it off and let Leopard set it up again. You may think things went right...but the above shows that there may be issues with it that you may blame other apps for...but they're probably not guilty at all.
I don't think the combo update actually caused FileVault to turn corrupt, it was just what broke the camel's neck. While it's no fun to lose your homedirectory, I'm glad the underlying issue finally came to light.

Thanks to this thread, it's been solved.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97653

Spotlight does't find everything in Mail.app

Morning.
If I want to find something in Mail.app and type the searches item into the search field of Mail.app, not all items containing the string will be found.
But if I search for the same item with the system wide Spotlight search I find it.
What can I do to enable Mail.app's built-in search to find everything in my emails what Spotlight finds easily?
TIA and kind regards, Friedrich

Having same issue. Please post any solutions you may have discovered.
Thanks!

Spotlight - Entourage - Mail.app

There seems to be a lot of problems at the moment with Spotlight.
Maybe mine is only a minor one!?
I use Entourage as my main mailing program and have it synchronized with Mail.app. My Spotlight now only finds mail from mail.app and not from Entourage. It was capable of doing that before.
Any ideas?
Greetings from Germany…….

And in the end it was sooooo easy!
ALL here: http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage/browse_thre ad/thread/af9fe26311baa3ee/050059cb37d9cf9b?q=spotlight&lnk=nl&
I really only dropped the missing files (two) into the Spotlight Folder at Library ….. for me it worked like a charm.
The missing files http://www.entourage.mvps.org/downloads/Spotlight.zip
On 8/15/07 9:54 PM, in article  C2E90A91.D269%[email protected], "Diane Ross"
<[email protected]> wrote:
I have uploaded the files that belong in Library --> Spotlight folder for
downloading. I found that you had to use "Remove Office" then apply the
11.3.5 updater then 11.3.6 then 11.3.7. I believe that you can just drop in
the missing file into Spotlight folder and you'll get the preference in
Entourage to enable Spotlight without having to go through the entire
process of starting over.
"http://www.entourage.mvps.org/downloads/Spotlight.zip"
If it doesn't work, then you haven't spent much effort in trying.

How do you stop Mail App from recovering deleted emails

I use Mail app to manage multiple email boxes. Whenever I send a message, it will fail and ask me to send through another server. If it fails, it will infinitely ask this question. Also when I cancel it, it will infinitely recover and try to send the message. Even when I delete the mail box, it will bring it back. That email address is now unusable through the mail app because it shows the spinning wheel and tries to send/recover the one deleted message over and over.
I have read on this forum that if you delete the invisible folder below, it will get rid of the problem
~/Library/Mail/IMAP-<username>@[email protected]/.OfflineCache
Where is this folder? There is no folder in Library that is named "Mail". So I don't know what to do.

I did what you said but there is no file with "OfflineCache". I even used spotlight and it cannot find a file named or containing "OfflineCache". I saw the recovery folder and deleated the email in there. But when I start up Mail app, nothing has changed. I even deleted all the cashe on my system using CleanApp (hope this doesn't mess up anything) and nothing has changed. I can't even use Mail App until this is fixed.

Mail app is open and close after sec

When i go to mail i tap the app is open and it is closing in 3 seconds.I can not use mail app at all.Can you help me?I already restore my i phone as the instructions from telephone company support(Vodafone) but the problerm is still exist.I call at Apple support(0080044145417)but this office works from Monday to Friday.

Hi Eric,
the first thing to do is to go under
Hard drive/Users/your home/Library/Mail
and see what you have there.
Unless you had set up your mail program to store what you receive some other place, your e-mails should be there.
Try to Spotlight any file with the extension .emlx
Let me know.

TS2834 I've been using the mail app that came with my Mac for over a year. Out of the blue, it will not open and keeps saying "Mail cannot open because of a problem" and something about not being compatible ??? Help! I miss my mail

I've been using the mail app that came with my Mac for over a year. Out of the blue, it will not open and keeps giving me an error like "Mail cannot open because of an error and something about it not being compatible. Please help! I miss my mail

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then try the action that you're having trouble with again. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).
When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Mail app keeps crashing (and other related problems)

A few days ago, my Mail app began crashing on seemingly unrelated events, so I assume my data got corrupted. I won't explain all the scenarios because it's a complete mess. To keep it simple, I have only 2 accounts and they are both on Gmail, so no backups are needed. I'd like to try doing a complete wipe of all data that the Mail app uses and that should fix it.
What files/folders does Mail use? So far, I've found:
~/Library/Mail
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail
I've also seen someone mention ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist, but I don't have this file.
After deleting the above and creating my mail accounts, the crashes are back. The only possibilities I can think of are:
1. I haven't deleted EVERYTHING owned by Mail yet. <-- What other files/folders belong to the Mail app?
2. Mail is depending on something else on my system that is broken.
3. Mail app itself somehow became corrupted.
4. Something being synced from my Gmail is not properly being handled, resulting in a crash.
When this started happening (if it helps):
1 day after installing the OS X update 10.8.3 as well as MacBook Pro Retina SMC Update v1.1, my MBP froze as soon as I loaded League of Legends. This was followed by a reboot as I couldn't Cmd+Tab out of the game. I wasn't aware of the Force Close App shortcut at the time, so I used the power button. That was the only time this happened, and it has worked fine a few times after the updates were applied and also worked after the reboot following the freeze. Since that time, I have encountered another issue where just about all of my apps crashed simultaneously -- no 3D-accelerated apps were even running this time.
Since then, I've updated VirtualBox from 4.2.8 to 4.2.10 (seemed like something that could cause this weirdness as I always have a VM running) and have not had any problems except Mail crashing all the time.
This question is primarily about fully resetting the Mail app to clean settings/data, but any thoughts on what may have happened are also welcome

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Step 1
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the name of the crashed application or process in the Filter text field. Select the messages from the time of the last crash, if any. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).
When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.
Step 2
Still in the Console window, look under User Diagnostic Reports for crash reports related to the process. The report name starts with the name of the crashed process, and ends with ".crash". Select the most recent report and post the entire contents — again, the text, not a screenshot. In the interest of privacy, I suggest that, before posting, you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.) Please don’t post shutdownStall, spin, or hang logs — they're very long and not helpful.

I've deleted my Mail app. How to get it back?

Hi,
I have somehow, by accident (I have no idea how) deleted my Mail app. It is not in my applications folder and I cannot find it in spotlight. Is there somewhere I can download it or will I have to reinstall OS X, which would be a horror?
Any help is very welcome. Thanks!

Hello,
With Tiger, you need only to do a custom install. See:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301229
then after this custom install run the Combo Update to ensure that Mail is then compatible with your OS version. If you are only using 10.4.8, then you will need to search for the Combo that only takes you to that level. The first one you will find will be for 10.4.9, however.
Ernie

Mail attachment assertion failure Yosemite - Mail app bug

Hi,
I am facing a very annoying issue with Mail app. Since the upgrade to Yosemite, I am unable to save attachments with the "save all" button and the drag and drop is not working properly (sometime freezing the mail app for a minute). I am using Yosemite 10.10.2
I tried every fix I have read online, such as :
- rebuild mailboxes
- repair permissions
- remove 3 enveloppe index files in .../V2/MailData
- reindex spotlight
- run the command to repair permissions & reset home directory permissions and ACL (from this post : Mavericks Mail "Save Attachement..." doesn't work)
- onyx automations...
Nothing presented above fixed the problem.
Here are the console logs related to the issue :
20/02/2015 03:38:49,690 mdwrite[4655]: -[MDKeyRing initWithService:label:comment:] (/SourceCache/Spotlight/Spotlight-917.1/xpc-services/mdwrite/MDKeyRing.m:294) failed assertion -- Couldn't add Spotlight Metadata Privacy password to keychain! [osErr:-25295]
20/02/2015 03:38:49,973 Mail[4088]: Metadata.framework [Error]: error Connection interrupted
20/02/2015 03:38:49,973 Mail[4088]: *** Assertion failure in -[MailWebAttachment _addPrivateAttributes:], /SourceCache/Mail/Mail-2070.6/Mail/MessageDisplay/MessageView/DocumentModel/Mai lWebAttachment.m:331
20/02/2015 03:38:49,973 Mail[4088]: [QL] Exception raised while try to get launch url for preview item: Failure in _MDItemSetPrivateAttributes: 3
There is apparently a problem with the privacy attributes. Any idea of how to solve it?
Thanks for your help,
Best,
Laurent

Hi,
I am facing a very annoying issue with Mail app. Since the upgrade to Yosemite, I am unable to save attachments with the "save all" button and the drag and drop is not working properly (sometime freezing the mail app for a minute). I am using Yosemite 10.10.2
I tried every fix I have read online, such as :
- rebuild mailboxes
- repair permissions
- remove 3 enveloppe index files in .../V2/MailData
- reindex spotlight
- run the command to repair permissions & reset home directory permissions and ACL (from this post : Mavericks Mail "Save Attachement..." doesn't work)
- onyx automations...
Nothing presented above fixed the problem.
Here are the console logs related to the issue :
20/02/2015 03:38:49,690 mdwrite[4655]: -[MDKeyRing initWithService:label:comment:] (/SourceCache/Spotlight/Spotlight-917.1/xpc-services/mdwrite/MDKeyRing.m:294) failed assertion -- Couldn't add Spotlight Metadata Privacy password to keychain! [osErr:-25295]
20/02/2015 03:38:49,973 Mail[4088]: Metadata.framework [Error]: error Connection interrupted
20/02/2015 03:38:49,973 Mail[4088]: *** Assertion failure in -[MailWebAttachment _addPrivateAttributes:], /SourceCache/Mail/Mail-2070.6/Mail/MessageDisplay/MessageView/DocumentModel/Mai lWebAttachment.m:331
20/02/2015 03:38:49,973 Mail[4088]: [QL] Exception raised while try to get launch url for preview item: Failure in _MDItemSetPrivateAttributes: 3
There is apparently a problem with the privacy attributes. Any idea of how to solve it?
Thanks for your help,
Best,
Laurent

Mail app appears to open but no windows will open in ML

I updated ML last night and my mail app will not open the main reading pane window , I get the menu bar and I can get the compose window to open but not my inbox or my mailbox folders window , not sure if the update has anything to do with it but worked fine before that.I also saw a new or different option on one of the dropdown menus that I have not seen before "rebuild mailbox database" If I remember correctly. As I said earlier the only window I can get to open is my compose window , I have restarted and even turned completley off and restarted with no success , I have not tried deleting the .plist yet because I was hoping no to have to. Any help would be appreciated.......Thanks in advance

Which app icon is missing?
Are you sure it wasn't moved?
Have you checked on another page or in folders?
Does it show in spotlight search? (Swipe down from the center if the screen)
Check your restrictions:
Settings > General > Restrictions
You can also try resetting your Home Screen Layout:
Settings > General > Reset > Reset Home Screen Layout
Delete it:
Settings > General > Usage > select the app > Delete
and redownload:
Open the App Store > Updates > Purchased

Spotlight, mail.app & symlinks?

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