Table of Contents       21. NeoFinder and Text files


21.1 NeoFinder and Emails

NeoFinder can read the contents of Apple Mail files in the .eml and .emlx format. That allows you to efficiently search your emails, better than Apples Mail.app itself can do that.

Here is how that works.

1.
Catalog your mail folder, and make sure the setting to read Text File previews is activated in the Cataloging Preferences. Also, you want to increase the numBytesForTextFiles hidden preferences option to a large value, to get the entire content of your email messages.

Apple Mail stores your emails in:

/Users/*/Library/Mail/

You must allow NeoFinder
Full Disk Access in the Security settings of the System Preferences, or the contents of your mail folder cannot be read by NeoFinder.

full disk access


2. Set up the Find Editor to search your catalog with the Mail folder, and then add as many search criteria as you need, as in this case. You want to use the
Text Content option in the first menu in each row.

results



NeoFinder will show you the resulting mails. As the email messages have rather nondescript file names, you can use the Text Preview section of the Inspector so see the actual content of the selected message.

email content

With a swift double click on the wanted email message, you will open that message in Apples Mail, ready to be replied to.