I'm sorry to say this really isn't advanced at all. It's far more limited than Spotlight, and even less advanced than the searches you can set up in smart mailboxes, which are already pretty weak. I'll try to explain:

In Spotlight you can perform Boolean searches, such as "from:john OR from:bill", but these won't work in Mail. They are always AND searches (all messages from John AND Bill, rather than all messages from John and all messages from Bill). If you try to type OR it'll actually search for OR!!

In smart folders (and also rules as it happens), you can either match ALL criteria (AND searches), or you can match ANY criteria (OR searches). This is more powerful than the hint, but won't achieve for example: "from Bill or from John, with "snuff" in the subject, but not from the "legal drugs" folder". This was true in Tiger as well.

So in order of descending power, available searches for Mail.app run: Spotlight, followed by smart folders/rules, followed by this hint, followed by Mail's search bar.

Remember that to use this hint, the search type must be set to "entire message".

Mark

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This is true. I was looking at the plist that the Smart Mailboxes are stored in and you really can't do more complex stuff there. I was kind of hoping they'd be stored more in a format like the Finder's smart folders, which are easy to edit. But they did things in a very weird way.

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I still like it. I rarely use OR's in my mail searches. It appears that double quotes work but single quotes do not. e.g. from:"bob marley"

The email: appears to be any email address.



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this is still better than nothing!

do someone know of a reference specific to Mail.app on the possible fields and syntax somewhere online?

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My point was that it doesn't replace nothing! You could already do far more than this using either Spotlight or smart mailboxes.

I do accept that it enables slightly more advanced searches to be performed from the search bar instead of having to set up a smart mailbox, but I'd rather they'd spent time making those more useful instead of adding something you can already do (better) by other methods!

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This feature seems to be quite buggy. When I start a search in Mail on "Entire Message" and type "from:" the search switches from "Entire Message" to "From", but then doesn't match anything (apparently because it's searching for a message from someone named "from:bob"). If I then manually switch back from a "From" search to an "Entire Message" search (again), it behaves as expected. Is this a case of Mail trying to be smart but failing?

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hey, I just upgraded to Leopard and suddenly my "entire message" option is not available when I search messages.

I know that this works from within spotlight so I forced a re-indexing to see if that would solve the problem, but no joy.

I find the messages in spotlight from the menu bar (so spotlight is searching them) but they are not presented in the context of mail which is much less useful.

any ideas?

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