Leopard brought us a much (!) improved version of Spotlight which can be used to create very complex searches. Try typing in Spotlight, for example:

from:john subject:"Next Meeting"

This hint links to a full list of operators you can use in this manner.

For some reason this does not yet extend to Mail's in-app search function. I hope this is an oversight that will be soon fixed.

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I'm finding Mail 3.1 (Leopard 10.5.1) to appropriately respond to this type of search. So it looks like the new Spotlight features are implemented in Mail.

I tried from:john subject:"Next Meeting" (I had a handful with "Next Meeting" in the subject, but I changed the from name since I didn't have one from John. But it did work properly I also tried a few other combinations all of which worked.

Sweet!

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No, it's not a full implementation, and not even as powerful as the smart mailbox editor. What you used there acts as an AND search only (at least the editor offers either AND or OR), and you can't use boolean operators (AND, OR etc) as you can in Spotlight.

Mark

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It doesn't work for Mail properly though, as far as I can tell. Try "from:john OR from: Bill". It won't find all messages from John and all messages from Bill (as opposed to all messages from John and Bill, which would be an AND search), and nothing else.

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