Dec 04, '07 07:30:09AM • Contributed by: johnga1t
I'm not sure if this is common knowledge (a couple of quick searches turned up nothing related) or completely obscure, but Mail.app's search is more advanced than it appears. It seems that you can structure searches using fields...
keyword1 from:some_user subject:some_word
...to search for all messages that match keyword1 in the entire message that are from some_user and have some_word in the subject. It seems that the search box is completely mimicking Spotlight, which gives the power of Spotlight searches inside of Mail.
After playing with this a bit, it seems that from: will search names, whereas email: will search email address. For instance, in searching for a message from jdoe@somewhere.com (John Doe), you can use from:john or from:doe or email:jdoe or email:somewhere.com. (Mail seems unforgiving when no wildcards are used, e.g. email:doe@somewhere doesn't turn up any results.)
[robg adds: I'm about 99% certain this is 10.5 only, but I'm traveling today and only have a 10.5 machine with me; a friend ran a quick 10.4 test, and it doesn't seem to work as described here.]
