#137 new
larrycz

Search entire message (Apple Mail style)

Reported by larrycz | May 30th, 2011 @ 10:22 PM

This is a feature request

A very common search scenario is searching throughout the from/to fields, subject line and message body, all at the same time.

So when I am looking for an email from Buffy that talks mentions vampires in the subject line and mentions silver bullets in the message, I can just type these search terms:

"buffy vampire silver"

This is what works in Apple Mail.

Or is there another way of doing this already? I am only aware of using the mouse to construct a search query like this:

  • from contains "buffy"
  • subject contains "vampire"
  • message contains "silver"

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny May 30th, 2011 @ 10:58 PM

    • State changed from “new” to “resolved”
    • Assigned user set to “benny”

    There is “Common Headers and Body” which searches all address fields, subject, and unquoted text.

    Also note that you can setup what you want to see by default when doing a mailbox search. See “Edit ▸ Find ▸ Use as Default Search”. This way you can setup some of your typical search terms. MailMate will ignore those with empty values.

    I have some ideas for how searching should/could work (making it easier to do various typical searches), but for now you have to use the approach described above.

  • larrycz

    larrycz June 1st, 2011 @ 08:19 PM

    Using "Common Headers and Body" in conjunction with "Use as Default Search" is satisfactory. Fine to leave this ticket as resolved. Thanks!

  • larrycz

    larrycz June 1st, 2011 @ 08:46 PM

    See also ticket 67

  • Mike K

    Mike K August 18th, 2012 @ 01:28 AM

    This should be fixed so it actually searches the whole message. It is very frequent for people to answer questions in emails by quoting the question, then answering it. As it is, if I search for my questions using the "Common Headers And Body" feature, the emails in which they are answered do not appear in the search results. (I was motivated to sign up for an account just to leave this comment, as I just lost quite a bit of time over this issue, hunting for an email I knew was there but which wasn't showing in the results.)

    I understand now that I have to search using both "Common Headers And Body" AND "Quoted Text" to find every email that contains a given string in it's body. But why should I have to do that? I've never before seen a search feature, in any program, that makes you search two different ways to find one thing.

    As an email user, I'm not interested in the specifics of quoted or unquoted text. When I search for something, I want to the search results to display all matching emails, not dither over whether or not to show emails because of how it happens to be formatted within the message.

    Thanks.

  • benny

    benny August 18th, 2012 @ 01:23 PM

    I get your point, but personally I consider it a feature that only unquoted text is matched. This is particularly useful when trying to find any original messages mentioning something instead of any number of messages in the same threads.

    I would like to find a solution which would make both kinds of searches possible and make it more obvious what is done or not done. I'll think about this. Thanks for the feedback.

  • Benjamin

    Benjamin April 11th, 2018 @ 04:00 PM

    Hey, sorry about resurrecting this thread.

    I just stumbled upon this behaviour. I like the fact that it's possible to distinguish between search for unquoted and quoted body text.

    However, I couldn't find an easy way to search for both in the current MailMate version.

    How can I combine the keywords q and b?

    Let's say I want to search for two words in all of my mailboxes. In Apple Mail I would just type into the search field:

    word1 word2

    Apple Mail would then search in subjects, names, addresses and bodies for occurrences. For example, in the results there would be mails which have word1 in the subject an word2 in the body text, irrespective of the question if the word was in a quoted or unquoted part of the body.

    How would I do this in MailMate?

  • benny

    benny September 22nd, 2022 @ 11:43 AM

    • State changed from “resolved” to “new”

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