replacing Spotlight as my email search tool

bsenftner

Registered
Anyone have any idea how to replace Spotlight as the search tool for Mail.app? I can't get "entire message" search to ever undim so I can select it, and following the guidelines to get Spotlight to reindex and operate correctly creates a 30 gig search index on a 130 gig hard drive (MacBook Pro, 3 years old). Once the Spotlight index is rebuilt it is completely useless, because the mac then only has 100 MB left free and can not do anything...

Perhaps the answer is to move the Spotlight index to a different drive.. is that possible? I have 4 TB of external drives attached to this machine...
 
What happens if you select one of the other options, (From-To-Subject), then maybe you can select "Entire Message" which on my system is selected by default, therefore it shows as dim or grey.
 
all the other options work fine. However, for searching emails, those selections are rarely what I need.

I ended up disabling Spotlight, and then with the free EasyFind.app I just point it at the directory where my email is stored and it accomplishes the search licketedly split. Much better than screwing around with Spotlight.

I'm primarily a developer, and Spotlight's search is useless for searching development directories - it does not seem to index them, or if it does it does a really poor job. The only thing I really needed spotlight for was email searching, and when I upgraded to 10.6 "entire message" search stopped working.

EasyFind.app is great - no indexing, and quite fast...
 
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