[MlMt] Index

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 14 Mar 2013, at 18:35, Olivier Bedouelle wrote:

> I use to be able to foxtrot index all my files and find them quickly. 
> Foxtrot [c'est ici](http://www.ctmdev.com/) can also carry his finger 
> on the ipad and search all file very quickly.
>
> MailMate does not index messages with foxtrot and spotlight. Is that 
> possible to predict?

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.

For the record, I'll explain this in detail.

MailMate saves emails in the standard raw format and uses the `.eml` 
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.

Apple Mail saves emails in an undocumented format and uses the `.emlx` 
extension. These are very similar to the `.eml` files saved by MailMate. 
The difference is that `.emlx` has a prefixed message size and a 
suffixed property list with various data about the message. These files 
are indexed by Spotlight.

It would be trivial for Apple to add that Spotlight also indexes `.eml` 
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 `.emlx` might be small in general, but this is contradicted by 
the fact that I have `.emlx` files with sizes up to 10 MB. In other 
words, I don't really know why Spotlight does not parse `.eml` files.

Possible solutions are:

1. Apple changes the behavior of Spotlight (I filed an enhancement 
request).
2. MailMate provides its own Spotlight importer replicating the behavior 
of the Apple plugin for `.emlx` files.
3. MailMate saves files in the `.emlx` format.

Solution 1 is unlikely, solution 2 is a lot of work, and solution 3 is a 
hack since the `.emlx` format is undocumented. A quick test shows that 
it seems to be enough to save as `.emlx` with a prefixed message size 
(on Lion), but there is not guarantee that this is going to continue to 
work in the future.

-- 
Benny
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