#HOW DO YOU SEARCH FOR KEYWORDS ON A MAC FULL#

Tokens are great because they make searching less error-prone and easier to manipulate. That bubble is a search token-a unit that functions as a special, adjustable search term. Select one of those items (for example, a sender’s name) and Mail encapsulates the item in a little gray bubble.

#HOW DO YOU SEARCH FOR KEYWORDS ON A MAC FULL#

If Mail notices that whatever you’ve typed is part of a name, email address, date, subject, or other message header, it may display the corresponding full item in the list. If you ignore the list of suggestions, or select the default choice at the top (“Message contains:”), Mail simply searches entire messages (including headers and metadata) for that literal text. Choose a person’s name from the People category of the suggestion list and a search token appears with that person’s name. If you see what you’re looking for in the list, you can save yourself a bit of typing by simply selecting it, either by clicking it or by using the arrow keys to highlight the item and then pressing Return. Use Suggestions and Tokens As you type your search term, the Search field displays a drop-down list of suggestions-not of matching messages, but of text or other elements Mail thinks you might be looking for.

To hide the results and return to the message list, click the X icon in the Search box. (To jump right to the Search field, press Command-Option-F.) Mail begins displaying results in the message list immediately-sometimes even before you finish typing. Then start typing your query in the Search field in Mail’s toolbar. To find an email message, begin by (optionally) selecting one or more mailboxes in the Mail’s sidebar to restrict your search to those mailboxes. Select “Message contains” (as shown here), and Mail searches message contents for whatever is in the Search field. As you type a search term, suggested queries appear in a list. You can even save a search by converting it into a smart mailbox, as I describe at the end of this article. With a flexible system of search tokens (which I explain in a moment), Boolean searches, and other options, you can find almost any message you can describe. OS X’s Spotlight search feature automatically indexes all the messages in Apple Mail for super-fast searching, and you can search for those messages either within Mail or using the system-wide Spotlight menu.īut Mail isn’t limited to simple text searches.

How do you search for keywords on a mac