(Revised May 2008)
The latest versions of Apple Mail use
Spotlight, the superfast search technology built into Mac OS
X. With Spotlight, you can find messages easily and
instantly. In this short tutorial, I'll show you how easy it
is to search all your Mail messages with Spotlight.
Spotlight Search Box
The Spotlight search box is located on the
top right side of the Mail window. When you type a word or
phrase in the box, Spotlight can search for the text in email
messages in any selected mailboxes or in all of your
mailboxes.
1. Type a search term in the search box and the
Spotlight Search Bar will appear under the Mail
toolbar.
2. Choose where Mail searches for email messages that contain your search term by selecting the mailbox(es) you want from the Search Bar.
3. Select the part of each email
message to search: Entire Message, From/To or Subject.
Search Results Pane
As soon as you begin to search, the Message
List changes to the Search Results Pane and email messages in
the selected mailboxes that contain your search term
immediately appear in the pane.
4. To save the results of your
search, click the Save button on the far right side of the
Search Bar. The Smart mailbox dialog box will open and you
can create a Smart mailbox with links to the email messages
from the search results. Every time you receive a new
email message that meets the search criteria, a link to that
message will be added to the Smart mailbox.
Learn more about using Spotlight and Smart mailboxes with
Mail in our Easy Guide to Apple's
Mail Program and our Introduction to Leopard - Book 2.
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