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.)Similar Posts:

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• A modest Leopard Mail wish-list
• PocketLight: Search Panther Mail, iCal, Address Book
• MailSteward 5.5.0
• Getting Quicksilver iCal syntax right

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, searchingSimilar Posts:

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Find emails faster in Leopard Mail

Before Leopard it was possible to find emails in the list view of a mailbox faster by using the Mail Type Select plugin. With this installed, Mail.app jumped to the first message that matched your keystrokes, just as Finder does. So typing “Ros” quickly found the first email in the mailbox from Rosemary.

Now this feature is built into Leopard Mail by default. Try it out. It makes a difference.

Do your sums faster

Now that I am a Dean and need to set and manage budgets, I need to do sums more than ever before. A nice new feature in the Spotlight window, does your sums for you.

Just type in an equation, say, “12 * 34″ and Spotlight goes to Calculator and does the sum for you, giving you the answer in the Spotlight results. Nifty.

Edit iCal to-dos and events faster

In Tiger you could edit events and to-dos from the information pane. Now, iCal’s sidebar has gone to God. To edit an iCal item, you need to double-click it, wait for the details pane and then click again on the edit button on the bottom.

These extra clicks add up over time. Especially if, like me, you live in a fluid world in which tasks and meetings are always changing.

Luckily, there is a short cut to get straight to editing an event or a to-do.

Click once on the iCal item to highlight it. Then press ⌘-e (Command + ‘e’) and you launch into an edit dialog straight away.

Create better iCal events in Mail faster

Hovering the mouse over a name or details of an event in Leopard Mail activates Leopard’s Data Detector and produces a drop box with the option to add it to Address Book or iCal.

That’s pretty smart, but there is something even smarter lurking here.

If you block all a contact’s information before you hover over the name, for example, or details of an event for iCal, the data detector pastes all the information into the new contact’s or event’s notes field.

Get more out of iCal’s Dashboard Widget

The iCal Widget in Leopard has a secret up its sleeve. If you click on it once, it displays the monthly calendar we all knew and loved in Tiger.

Click on it once more, and it pulls your events for the day out into a third pane:

I get this information more easily from MenuCalendarClock, but if I didn’t have it, I’d value it here. UPDATE: Thirty seconds after posting this I found a smarter Dashboard solution.

[Via macOSXHints , TUAW , trial and error and poking around]mail.app, apple mail, ical, leopard, productivity, tips, dashboard, events, to-dos, calculator, spotlight, apple, widgetSimilar Posts:

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Formerly a member of the development team for Flock (“The Social Browser”), he once toyed with idea himself.

He has mocked up a vision of how this might look in Address Book:

Image shamefacedly nicked without any kind of permission from Chris’ post

The possibilities, he suggests, are enormous:

Imagine this kind of view showing up in Mail.app, Adium, iChat… where your friends, family and the rest get to update their own user pictures on a whim, and set their status and contact preferences in a way that visually makes sense.

This is a terrific idea. One of the best things about Mail is its human face.

Pulling the photos from contacts in Address Book and displaying them in their emails makes my day more personal. It humanises the time I spend emailing and reminds me that I am really dealing with the people behind the emails, not just with text. In fact, this was one of the reasons why I switched from PCs to Macs a few years ago.

For the same reason, I really like the iFaces notification utility, which still worked under Tiger but sadly may not work anymore. It sat on the Desktop and displayed the faces of people who had written newly arrived and unread emails (see screenshot on the right).

It’s another small way to give email a human face.

Of course, Chris is talking about something far more adventurous than that. I’m only imagining how good it would to have that contact information to hand in the results of a “Spotlight: Xxxx Xxxx” search from the Contextual Menu in Mail.app. Chris’ vision is more informed and his horizon wider.

UPDATE: As Aaron Harnly points out in the comments, you can get a rough and ready experience of what this might be like, by browsing your ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/Metadata folder with Coverflow in Finder:

You can even use it to play the “face recognition game” Aaron describes. Hours of funmail.app, address book, contacts, coverflow, spotlight, apple, leopardSimilar Posts:

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It’s almost too powerful for its own good. For example, it loves to get going as soon as you type in the first few letters of your search, which can be frustrating. And it loves to find everything it can, smothering you in an avalanche of hits from your hard drive.

Productivity takes a hit from the waiting and from the extra sifting of results.

Two apps can help. HoudahSpot helps you to control Spotlight’s power for more focussed searches and Searchlight extends Spotlight’s reach to files on a network’s server.

HoudahSpot: Sharper focus for Spotlight’s muscle

HoudahSpot is a “front-end” for Spotlight. It offers an easy way to create complicated Boolean searches in Spotlight and to restrict results easily to a particular class of object (image, document, PDF, etc).

It comes tooled up with pre-defined templates for “long lost” documents and recent documents, and with hotkeys for saved searches.

The interface consists of a series of familiar fields for constructing your search:

Say, for example, I wanted to find a paper I began two years ago, which seemed like a good idea at the time but ran out of steam unfinished. I know that it was about Tertullian, but I don’t want to wade through the 450+ hits Spotlight will produce by itself.

I remember that it mentions Tertullian and Augustine and that it was a Word Document.

A HoudahSpot search quickly finds the most likely matches and even gives me a preview of the selected one so that I can double-check that it’s right:

HoudahSpot is shareware (USD 14.95) is available from the developer’s web site .

Searchlight: Spotlight searching for servers

Searchlight brings Apple’s Spotlight to the network.

Searchlight brings Spotlight searching to a Mac OS X server, allowing all the clients on the network to search it for files. The recently released version 1.1 also supports SMB, so that Spotlight can also search mounted Windows volumes.

It provides a web interface to its searches, built with Ruby on Rails and accessible to Mac, Windows and Linux users.

Document subscription via RSS keeps users informed when documents change or new ones are created.

Searchlight is shareware (USD 29.90) and is available from the developer’s web site .spotlight, productivity, searches, tips, helpful apps, server, network, not apple mailSimilar Posts:

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Smallerdemon adds himself to that list, writing a five part series comparing his experiences of using Mail.app to life with Entourage.

The verdict: “Mail.app was given a good, fair shake I think, but Entourage’s interface and features drew me back.”

Part one addresses the new features in Entourage 2004 11.2.3 like Spotlight and sync support.

Parts two and three consider how the interface of Entourage is nicer than Mail’s.

In parts four and five he talks about how the Project Center is one of the key things that drew him back to Entourage.entourage, mail.app, apple mail, interface, project center, spotlight, isyncSimilar Posts:

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The developer has released a final version of the app, which will no longer be updated.

It won’t run on 10.4, so I can’t provide a screenshot, but the interface looks (briefly before it quits) like Spotlight, offering matches for your search term in a separate “Spotlight pane” for Mail, iCal and Address Book

It contains French, Italian and German localisations.

PocketLight is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .panther, spotlight, mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, searching Similar Posts:

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Sven Semmler was delighted with the switch a week ago. He still is; Redmond is still making his day.

In his most recent post he describes how he can still do everything in Entourage that he once did with Mail. He also records some fixes for the problems of double Spotlight results and handling iCal invitations and reminders which users of the new Entourage experience. They would be worth recording, if this site was interested in Entourage.

James Caudill also finds Entourage far superior to Mail.app. He outlines a number of problems that made Mail unusable for him and make Entourage his email client of choice:

Don’t get me wrong. If someone said, “Hey they fixed a lot of stuff in Mail.App and it is stable now.” I will be the first one to try using it again. I love the simple layout and the pretty icons and stuff, but I really need dependability first.

Del.icio.us user mjg is heading back to Entourage too. He says, “Apple Mail just isn’t cutting it, especially with its lack of support for secondary-CA signed certificates.”entourage, mail.app, apple mail, spotlight, syncing, certificates, email, switching Similar Posts:

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Rather, he suggests, ask each email as it comes in:

1. What does this message mean to me, and why do I care?
2. What action, if any, does this message require of me?
3. What’s the most elegant way to close out this message and the nested action it contains?

Of course, Merlin crafts it all with characteristic verve and wit, so you should read the whole post.

Learn how your emails to Merlin only have a 50% chance of making it past the first question. It’s a jungle out there.

On macOSXHints, sap.1 outlines a simple but clever way to use Address Book, Spotlight, and Smart Mailboxes in Mail.app to stay on top of a particular set of email obligations. It involves using the power of Smart Mailboxes to sort and present emails in a helpful and efficient way.mail.app, apple mail, tips, email, triage, spotlight, address book, smart mailboxes, productivitySimilar Posts:

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Sven Semmler was delighted to see the latest service pack. He tried to use MailTags and Mail.app to organize himself after the GTD fashion, but found it didn’t work out for him.

Since moving over to try the new Entourage he is more than happy: “All I can say is: wow! Never before a service pack made me that happy. Big thanks to Redmond! You guys made my day.”

Michael at blindsquirrel.org also switched from Mail.app. Not that he was unhappy with it, just bored. He likes what he sees in the new Entourage but he does have one criticism:

The only weakness I see with the entourage syncing is that it can only sync with one calendar in iCal, and that calendar is a new one listed as entourage in the iCal interface. So if you have a bunch of calendars in iCal you have to switch their items over to the entourage calendar for them to automatically sync with the entourage calendar.

UPDATE: David Chartier at TUAW tells a cautionary tale about syncing his Address Book through the new Entourage. Ouch!entourage, spotlight, syncing, mail.app, apple mail, productivity, GTD, ical Similar Posts:

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