Zum Hauptinhalt springen

Apple Mail

On request, PDF Content Search also searches your emails from Apple Mail — subject, message body and attachments. The app reads the messages Apple Mail has stored on your Mac. Indexing and search run entirely locally; the message text, sender and subject never leave your Mac.

Setting Up Apple Mail

  1. Choose File → Enable Apple Mail from the menu (or use the sidebar's context menu)
  2. The Add Apple Mail to search dialog explains what is read. Click Next
  3. macOS protects the Mail folder. Click Choose Mail folder…, select the folder ~/Library/Mail and confirm with Grant Access. The permission is remembered across restarts
  4. Choose the accounts to search (default: All accounts) and click Enable Apple Mail

Apple Mail then appears as its own entry in the sidebar, and the app starts indexing. You can turn mail search off at any time via File → Disable Apple Mail.

Searching Mail

Select Apple Mail in the sidebar before searching, or check it during a search, and enter your search term. Emails appear together with the results from the checked folders; to see emails only, uncheck the folders. The search covers the subject, the message body and the text of attachments. The search syntax is the same as for documents: phrases in quotation marks and exclusions with -word work here too. One difference: in emails, -word only excludes words that begin with this character sequence.

Clicking a match shows the email with the matches highlighted. If a match is inside an attachment, the app shows the relevant page of the attachment with the match highlighted. ⌘G and ⌘⇧G jump to the next or previous match across the message body and attachments.

  • Attachments (n): Lists the email's attachments; open individual attachments, or use Save All… to save them all at once
  • Open in Apple Mail: Opens the email in Apple Mail
  • Show in Finder or Return in the result list: Reveals the mail file in Finder

Emails or attachments that Apple Mail has not fully downloaded to the Mac yet are marked Not yet downloaded by Apple Mail. Open the email once in Apple Mail; it then becomes searchable.

Attachments

  • PDF attachments: By default the first 20 pages are read; optionally all pages
  • Image attachments (PNG, JPG, HEIC): text is recognized via OCR
  • Text attachments (RTF, TXT, CSV, HTML, JSON, XML) and forwarded .eml messages
  • Office attachments (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, Pages, Numbers): only when conversion on our server is turned on (see Settings → More). Only the attachment goes to the server, never the text of the email

Settings

Under Settings → Integrations → Apple Mail you decide what is indexed:

  • Index Apple Mail: Turns mail search on or off
  • OCR size limit per attachment: 25, 50, 100 or 200 MB (default: 50 MB). Larger PDF and image attachments are skipped and cannot be found by search; the email itself remains searchable
  • Make OCR text from image attachments (PNG/JPG/HEIC) searchable (default: on)
  • Scan all pages of PDF attachments (instead of only the first 20) (default: off)
  • Index text attachments (RTF, TXT, CSV, HTML, JSON, XML) (default: on)
  • Recursively index forwarded .eml messages (default: on)
  • Search Office attachments (default: on; only takes effect with conversion on our server turned on)
  • Reconfigure accounts…: Reopens the setup to change which mailboxes are indexed
  • Clear mail index: Removes all indexed mail content; on the next start the app re-reads your mail

A status box shows the indexing progress, the number of searchable attachments and, if any, emails without content that the app retries in the background.