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.

Spotlight search bar

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.

Spotlight search results 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.

Smart mailbox pane