I can’t remember if it was with Ventura or Sonoma, but HoudaSpot ceased being able to search Apple Mail, as a result of Apple making changes to the OS. This used to be my favorite way to be able to do complex searches of Mail, and I miss it.
I’m curious if there are any other ways to search Apple mail, other than using Apple’s neutered search feature? Are there any robust mail search tools that allow boolean, phrase and wildcard searches?
What’s your favorite way to search mail? Once a year, I’ll export old mail to DEVONthink which allows me to do advanced searches, but this doesn’t work for searching the current mailbox.
Interesting. As I understand it, HoudaSpot is an advanced front-end to the system’s Spotlight search API. I don’t think it does its own indexing/searching.
Can Spotlight search mail? If not, well, there’s the problem. If it can, then it sounds like HoudaSpot needs an update.
InfoClick has been wonderful for me for years. It creates its own database and does not use Spotlight. That said I have found search in Apple Mail has improved in the last few years but I still resort to InfoClick quite often.
I reached out to Pierre, the maker of HoudahSpot, and asked him if it still works in Apple’s email and he told me:
It does not. At one point Apple migrated Mail indexing from traditional Spotlight to “Core Spotlight”. Apple does not allow third-party applications to search Core Spotlight. It allows third-party applications access only to the data the application itself has added to the index. Only Apple’s own Spotlight window is allowed to search all of Core Spotlight. You may want to submit feedback to Apple requesting that third-party applications can request permission to search all of Core Spotlight.
For a while, HoudahSpot has offered a plug-in for the Apple Mail application. This plug-in could run searches within the Mail application and pass results to the HoudahSpot application.
Unfortunately, Apple Mail no longer supports plug-ins. Thus this workaround to the Core Spotlight issue no longer works.