Can find context of .eml files (outside of mail.app)— Spotlight won’t!

First, for those who are wondering: EasyFind works great under Yosemite.

This app is a simple, free workaround to a major issue with Spotlight: Spotlight refuses to index .eml files unless they are part of mail.app’s repository. So, if you have email archives from some other email application stored someplace other than in mail.app, and you need to find something, you’re out of luck with Spotlight. (Previous Spotlight hacks such as forcing the file-type to ‘TEXT’ simply do not work any more, and no plug-ins seem to be available for Spotlight anymore, much less ones that would get the job done.)

So, just install EasyFind from the App Store, and in the Settings drawer be sure to checkmark .eml as a file type to search. Use the Select… pull-down to point it at the folder you want it to search (it will search sub-folders automatically), and give it the keyword you want it to look for. In short order, it will present a list of files meeting your search criterion. You can scroll down these using QuickLook (hit the spacebar!) to see what each contains.

Searching a massive trove of emails does take some time, though. I have a gmail repository going back quite a while and amounting to approximately half a million .eml files, and it took perhaps five or ten minutes to go through them all to find a specific keyword (which occurred in about 4,000 emails). Subsequent searches take the same amount of time; I conclude that EasyFind doesn’t index but rather greps your files on-demand. While that sacrifices some speed in the case of massive file collections like mine, it also means there’s no index to potentially break, and no time required to index.

Recommended!

SanJoseScott about EasyFind