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10.4: Entire Message vs. Subject searches in Mail
Authored by: moritzh on Oct 18, '05 08:51:08AM

I have completely disabled Spotlight on my system at the moment which means that while I can search in the "From", "To", "Subject" Fields (because this is done using Mail.app's search functionality using its own SQLITE database stored in the file EnvelopeIndex), I cannot search using the "Entire Message" criterion (because for this, Spotlight functionality and the Spotlight database are used), so I cannot test right now.

However, back when I was still using 10.3, I think I once came to the conclusion that searching in the "Entire Message" meant searching only in the actual message body, not the full text of the raw message source (which you can view with cmd+option+u). That means searching the 'entire message' does not search in _any_ headers, including not only "Received", "Content-Type" etc. which are generally not of interest, but also "Subject", "From" and "To".

As I said, I can't test it now, but I suspect that even though the entire message searching has moved to Spotlight with 10.4, the mechanism has remained the same as before. Perhaps someone else can post back and (not) confirm.

Personally, I'd very much prefer a search on the "Entire message" to apply to the entire message including headers. And, oh dear, I'd also very much prefer an "Entire message" search for "box" to find messages with the word "mailbox" in it, too...

I've never thought about the possibilty that there's a difference in how Mail.app handles the "Entire Message" vs. "Subject" search phrases, so I've never looked that up in the help (thanks for pointing it out).

I've seen some search results that seemed very odd (to say the least) to me just as the original poster and Rob, so taking into account that now there are different search databases as well (SQLITE, Spotlight - which have certain bugs/can become corrupted (independently), e.g. see http://www.macosxhints.com/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20050822185354706&pid=0 - first comment), I gave up trying to understanding exactly how the different searches work.

When a search result doesn't contain something I'm quite sure exists, I always say to myself what my brother used to say when he was very very small whenever he could not _find_ something my parents told him to get: "I can't _look_ for it!"



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