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<p>On 14 Mar 2013, at 18:35, Olivier Bedouelle wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I use to be able to foxtrot index all my files and find them quickly. Foxtrot <a href="http://www.ctmdev.com/">c'est ici</a> can also carry his finger on the ipad and search all file very quickly.</p>
<p>MailMate does not index messages with foxtrot and spotlight. Is that possible to predict?</p>
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<p>I don't know Foxtrot, but I assume it requires Spotlight (plugins) to work. Unfortunately Spotlight does not work for the email files saved by MailMate. This is the short answer.</p>
<p>For the record, I'll explain this in detail.</p>
<p>MailMate saves emails in the standard raw format and uses the <code>.eml</code> extension. This extension is recognized by OS X and Quick Look can display these files nicely, but for some reason these files are NOT indexed by Spotlight.</p>
<p>Apple Mail saves emails in an undocumented format and uses the <code>.emlx</code> extension. These are very similar to the <code>.eml</code> files saved by MailMate. The difference is that <code>.emlx</code> has a prefixed message size and a suffixed property list with various data about the message. These files are indexed by Spotlight.</p>
<p>It would be trivial for Apple to add that Spotlight also indexes <code>.eml</code> files, but maybe there is some technical problem preventing this. Apple Mail does seem to split up emails with attachments in multiple files such that <code>.emlx</code> might be small in general, but this is contradicted by the fact that I have <code>.emlx</code> files with sizes up to 10 MB. In other words, I don't really know why Spotlight does not parse <code>.eml</code> files.</p>
<p>Possible solutions are:</p>
<ol>
<li value=1>Apple changes the behavior of Spotlight (I filed an enhancement request).</li>
<li value=2>MailMate provides its own Spotlight importer replicating the behavior of the Apple plugin for <code>.emlx</code> files.</li>
<li value=3>MailMate saves files in the <code>.emlx</code> format.</li>
</ol>
<p>Solution 1 is unlikely, solution 2 is a lot of work, and solution 3 is a hack since the <code>.emlx</code> format is undocumented. A quick test shows that it seems to be enough to save as <code>.emlx</code> with a prefixed message size (on Lion), but there is not guarantee that this is going to continue to work in the future.</p>
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<p>Benny</p>
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