Spotlight searching in Apple Mail is pretty good, but what if it could be even better?

Rocketbox is the plugin that delivers that wish — lightning fast, very smart searching, above and beyond what Spotlight can provide.

This plugin offers the ability to filter searches by several clever criteria that work together quickly to find the needle in a haystack.

The main interface shows how it works. An initial search term is further refined by mailbox, account, time range, and whether or not the email is flagged, has been replied to or forwarded. The results can be sorted by time or relevance:

The search term is highlighted in the results preview, making it faster to see if the particular hit is relevant or not.

The search terms themselves can be specified in a large variety of ways, including by boolean operators and by person:

And it’s fast. The developer, Central Atomics, provides a graphic that gives a good sense of the improvement:

It installs itself as a classic mail.app plugin in the Bundles folder of your Mail Directory. So it’s painless to remove either manually or with the uninstaller provided in the disk image.

An option in the View menu allows you to toggle between Rocketbox and Mail’s own search function (especially important for those who use the custom search features in MailTags ). Grey and white candybar stripes in the search box remind you that Rocketbox is installed and active.

Matt Ronge has detailed his plans for the plugin’s future development, including MailTags integration (yeah!), list view, domain searching and more.

He writes in an email:

Right now I’m doing major work on the engine to make way for these enhancements. Beyond that, I have ideas but nothing I want to make concrete yet (I have one big UI change planned, but can’t comment on that yet).

While he is coy about declaring his hand, he assures me that this next major version will be free for those who have bought version 1.0.

Rocketbox is available from Central Atomics web site where you will also find some nifty searchable FAQs .

It costs USD 14.95. Is it worth it? It depends how much your time is worth. I have a lot of email. After using it for a day, I can already see how much time it will save me.

I am about to revise my ancient post on the Top 10 Things every Mail.app user should have. This will be in it.

(Disclosure: I ought to say that Matt was kind enough to provide me with a license so that I could test out the plugin and write this piece. Thanks.)

While I was away, an interesting thing happened in the world of productivity apps for Mac. Nicholas Jitkoff, the developer of Quicksilver , was hired by Google to develop something similar for the company and its ever-expanding suite of apps. (Ars Technica carries the full story.)

The result is a sleek little app called “Google Quick Search Box”.

It has nothing like the power and range of Quicksilver, but it does provide a way to launch applications quickly and to perform a few other time-saving tricks:

As the name suggests, QSB is focussed on finding things. It doesn’t have the flexibility that Quicksilver enjoys, but it is good at searching. Of course, as one might expect, it excels at searching your Gmail archives and Google Apps documents.

But it can also find a bookmark in Safari or Camino and launch it, find a song in iTunes and play it, find a contact and display the information or start a new email to that person, and so on. It can find a document and offers the option to do one of six things with it:

A few weeks ago, extra plugins for the app began to appear, written by users, that expand its power and reach.

Aaron Ecay has written plugins for Firefox bookmarks, and two more that allow the interface to execute shell scripts and Applescript.

Martin Kühl has written plugins that access Leopard’s Services, search inside your Smart Folders and gain access to your Dock items. He makes these available on the github social coding web site where they are listed down the left-hand side.

(UPDATE: Nathan Parry has written a plugin for delicious.com that allows you to search and manipulate your bookmarks and tags.)

With these plugins QSB gains something like the power of Quicksilver.

For example, using Martin’s Services plugin, you can find a document, “tab” into it and type the first few letters of a Service to apply it to that object.

Here I am quickly emailing a text document to a student using the plugin:

Google’s Quick Search Box is freeware and Leopard-only. Like all software that is still in development, and especially one that works together with third-party plugins, you will come across an occasional glitch.

The latest builds are available from its project page on code.google.com. There is also a Google Group that keeps you up to date with conversations between users and the development team, and with even better plugins that are sure to appear in short order.quicksilver, google, quick search box, productivity, servives, searching, gmail, google apps, applescript

A poster on macOSXHints notes that Leopard Mail now supports Spotlight sophistication in its searches.

This means that you can use a limited set of operators to construct more complex and better-targeted searches than you ever could before. Spotlight in Leopard can filter results by metadata categories like “author:” or “date:”. Leopard Mail does the same thing.

For example, this search lets me quickly find all the emails sent from a Christ Church South Yarra email address that contain the word “beer”. Not as many as one might think! Still, the search enables me to find quickly that the answer is Boags.

Another search from work yesterday quickly finds all the emails from the Director of Communications at College which contain the word “font”. Without too much browsing I discover that Optima is the approved font for all external communications and can get on with actually writing one.

A third example. This search lists all the emails that have arrived since 3 December that mention Tiger, including the one from a Hawk Wings reader who wonders why I don’t post about Tiger Mail anymore.

Not everything about Leopard Mail is focussed on greater productivity, but this smarter way of digging through your email and finding what you are looking for is a great leap forward.

After a few posts carping on about this or that failing in Mail.app, it’s good to stumble on something like this and remember what a truly great email client it is.mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, beer, Christ Church South Yarra, tiger mail, productivity, spotlight, searching

Google has launched a Mac version of its Desktop search app.

Windows users have been able to use this for a while now as a kind of poor man’s Spotlight. Now it comes to Mac and brings with it several tricks that Spotlight can’t do. Hardcore Googlistas will love it.

As you would expect, it is able to search your drives for applications, files, emails and folders. But unlike Spotlight, it is also able to search your Gmail messages and web browsing history at the same time.

Desktop for Mac installs itself as a system-wide Preference Pane, where you can set the app’s options, including whether or not to include Gmail and your web-browsing history in the search results:

Another pane allows you to set the hotkey for Google Desktop (⌘ + ⌘ by default) and to determine how results are displayed.

Hitting the hotkey calls up a nicely-crafted search box. A search for “journo” lists emails from Mail.app and Gmail in one hit which is very handy, complete with a little snippet for each one, something I often wish Spotlight could provide:

In an extra nice touch for MailTags users like me, Google has made sure that the app is compatible with existing mdimporters. That means it recognises MailTags keywords, projects and notes and displays them in the results.

You can download Google Desktop for Mac from Google’s Mac software page .mail.app, apple mail, gmail, google, desktop, searching, web history, productivity

Microsoft is recommending that that employers increase the size of Exchange mailboxes, as it moves to head off the increasing trend among workers to auto-forward their email to more expansive Gmail accounts.

Other new features in Exchange 2007 also take aim at Gmail’s search and mobile-access features.

Dan Warne at APC Magazine reports that,

IT departments have traditionally applied such restrictive limits to Exchange Server mailboxes -as low as 25MB per staff member – that users have become frustrated with repeated “your mailbox is full” errors.

Meanwhile, only senior execs have been granted access to work email from home, or via a Blackberry.

As a result, more and more users are auto-forwarding all their email to Gmail, where they have a 2.7GB mailbox capacity and can access it wherever they are – even via a mobile phone.

Microsoft hopes that larger mailboxes will stem the flood.

It will also offer a search feature 35 times faster than Exchange 2003 and plans to release a mobile-access app for Exchange, code-named “Crossbow”, which will offer remote searching of, and quick access to, Exchange mail.

Not everyone is a lucky as me. The IT Department where I work would rather carve their own hearts out with an Apple Remote than run Exchange. It also provides bottomless mailboxes.

If you are really interested in what the new Exchange 2007 will be like, or if your workplace forces you to use it, you can see some demos of the new features on Microsoft’s web site.

You can also look forward to Microsoft’s promise that,

Exchange Server 2007 was designed from the ground up to enable your IT department to deliver bold new communication capabilities – voice-controlled inboxes, Outlook-based voice mail – without sacrificing productivity or compromising budgets.

[Via APC Magazine ]not apple mail, exchange, microsoft, gmail, mailboxes, mobile access, searching, 2007

Colin Devroe knows what he likes and doesn’t like about Mail.app, although he says that “I’m not as much of a power-user of Mail as I probably could be.”

He has produced a list of gripes and a modest list of wishes for Leopard Mail.

I see what he means when he asks for more flexible searching:

The search box should allow for multiple filters such as you find in the current Finder. Searching for a subject, then being able to click + to drill down until you find what you are looking for. I have about 12,500 pieces of email, and finding the 1 that I am looking for can sometimes prove difficult with a single search filter.

It would be great at the click of a Finder-like plus sign to search for emails from a particular sender with a particular word in the subject line:

That’s much easier than the Boolean search “hack” for Mail.

The complaint about smart mailboxes is also right on target. And well-observed; I’d not noticed it before.

When you create a smart mailbox and select “message is in mailbox” you get a list of your existing smart mailboxes. When you try to create a “message is not in mailbox” criterion, you don’t. Why not? He wants it fixed.

His modest feature requests — an iLife media browser and the automatic compression of multiple attachments — are not what I would choose, but it’s great to see someone thinking outside the box and coming up with features that add functionality not just eye-candy.

A fine post.mail.app, apple mail, bugs, leopard mail, smart mailboxes, searching, media browswer, attachments

Program co-Chair for O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention , Allison Randall, is the latest figure to produce a list of features for her dream email client (following TextMate developer Allan Odgaard and the celebrities in Hawk Wing’s “Talking Mail.app” series).

She’s called her piece “the problem of email”, and it’s not hard to see why:

When I say “my inbox is out of control”, people respond “Yeah, mine too. I spent 5 hours this weekend and knocked it down from 3,000 messages to 50 messages and I feel so much better.” I have over 20,000 messages spread out over 5+ inboxes. This is after I declared defeat 5 months ago, dumped everything into an archive, and started fresh. This is after I unsubscribed from all but the critical mailing lists (Perl lists and internal company mailing lists). This is after spending 3-5 hours every day working on email, and sometimes spending all day on it.

This leads to her to list the eight features in an email client that would help her “be faster and more effective at managing the email I’ve got”.

By my count, Apple Mail only does half of them.

[Thanks, Scott and Bruce]mail.app, apple mail, junk, tags, email, offline, to-do list, searching