Oct 18, '05 05:46:00AM • Contributed by: Anonymous
I rely very heavily on Mail's search feature to find mail from hundreds of companies that send me information on a regular basis. I was a bit surprised the other day when I was searching all mailboxes using the 'Entire Message' filter (what you get with the default ?-F), and it was unable to return mail that I knew contained the word I was searching for.
It turns out that Mail won't always search the Subject when you have Entire Message selected, though I've not figured out yet when it does and when it doesn't. For example, I did a search for the word "Stitcher" to look for press releases and correspondence about the program with that name. An 'Entire Message' search found three pieces of mail. Switching the filter to Subject returned 22 matches.
However, when I sent myself a piece of mail with a made-up word in the Subject and searched Entire Message, it found it. I have no idea what makes Mail find it sometimes and not find it other times. I use an IMAP server, so I'm curious as if the IMAP headers might be confusing Mail. So lacking better info, consider this a heads-up -- if you're searching for something that you're pretty sure is in the Subject field, switch to a Subject search to see all the matches.
[robg adds: I think this is actually expected behavior, though in practice, it can lead to some seemingly wrong results. Mail's help explains the difference in the two search types:
If you search in the From, To, or Subject fields in selected mailboxes, Mail finds messages that contain the entire search phrase, in the order you entered the words.However, even with that said, in my testing, I had some very odd results. The messages I was looking for all had the subject of Monthly Message from Kagi. Running a Subject search on that exact string finds 64 matches. Running an Entire Message search on Monthly, and then sorting by subject, I can see that all 64 messages are there. If I change the search string to Monthly Message and then group by subject, there are only 14 matches listed. So something still seems wrong about the way Entire Message search is working...]
If you search the entire message or search in all mailboxes, Mail only finds messages containing words that have the same prefix (or the same beginning letters) as any of the words you entered in the Search field. The words can be in any order. This is not as complete a search as searching the From, To, or Subject fields in selected mailboxes, since words you search for that appear only inside other words may not be found. For example, if you enter "box" in the Search field, your search won't find the word "mailbox," because "box" is not part of the prefix.
