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How can I stop Spotlight searching my email?

I like Spotlight well enough that I find myself using it a few times a week to help dig files out of my huge archives, but it always bugs me that it sees and indexes all my mail messages too. If I wanted to have all my email searched, I'd do so in the program itself. How do I disable this feature of Spotlight?

Dave's Answer:

It's funny how infrequently I think of using Spotlight, actually, because every time I experiment with it, I'm delighted by the results and think "cool, I should use this more often." Seems like you've had that same thought and made it stick. Good job! :-)

In terms of your question, I know exactly what you mean. Here's a sample search for my friend and colleague Ken McCarthy. Notice the categories of matched entries:

You can see an entire section of email messages have been matched.

To turn this off is pretty simple, fortunately. Choose the "Spotlight preferences..." at the bottom of the menu and you'll be whisked away to the Spotlight System Preference:

To stop email messages being included in your search results, simply uncheck "Mail Messages" and close the window up. I actually prefer to filter out matches that are Bookmarks, Music, Movies, Fonts and Presentations too, just to avoid false hits and confusing results.

Now when I do the very same search, the results omit email messages as I'd like:

Spotlight Search: No Email Messages Included

That should get your Spotlight configured as you seek!

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Categorized: Mac OS X Help (Article 6684)
Tagged: file search, mac os x, mac os x customization, spotlight
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Comments

That only solves a small part of the problem.
Since the spotlight popup can only show a few items of each kind, most of the times I have to click on "Show All" to get a scrollable window with all the search results.

In this window thousands of e-mails clutter the list, though the checkbox for e-mails is off! That is **way** more annoying than the 3 items your hint eliminates from the popup.

So, how to eliminate e-mails from the "Show All" search result window?

Posted by: Marc Stibane at May 11, 2009 6:09 AM

Thanks for the thorough advice, Dave, but I have the same problem as the last comment - I want to exclude email hits from my window spotlight search as well. It is only from there I can do the very useful "open containing folder", and having the window cluttered with loads of emails are not so good... Is there a solution to this?

//Nick

Posted by: knyck at September 25, 2009 3:18 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!