[X4U] spotlight and entourage

[Eddie Hargreaves]

On 5/11/05 12:39 PM, John Baltutis <baltwo at san.rr.com> wrote:

> On 05/10/05, Eddie Hargreaves <meged at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> On 5/5/05 6:54 PM, Lorin Roche <lorinroche at mac.com> wrote:
>>> On May 5, 2005, at 4:34 PM, x4u-request at listserver.themacintoshguy.com
>>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Spotlight will search messages from mail.app but how do I get it to search
>>>> messages from Entourage?
>>> 
>>> You just drag your Entourage folders to the desktop, where they become mbox
>>> folders, which are Spotlight searchable, is what I read.
>> 
>> Where did you read that? I haven't found that to be true at all. In fact,
>> Apple changed Mail's mailboxes from the mbox format in order to make the
>> messages searchable by Spotlight.
> 
> Really? That's not how I read
> <http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mail/2.0/en/ml1012.html>.
> Mail 2.0 now includes, in addition to the mbox for Mail, a subdirectory
> containing individual copies of messages in the mbox, which I surmise is
> what Spotlight uses for its searches.

That KnowledgeBase article does not state that Mail 2.0 uses mbox as its
mail format. It says that if you want to backup your mailboxes, "you can
either copy the Mail folder in your Library folder or create an mbox file"
which seems to implicitly mean that the ~/Library/Mail folder doesn't use
standard mbox files. It further states, "To create an mbox copy of a
mailbox, drag the mailbox from the mailbox list to your desktop," which I
think lends further credence.

In any event, my point was that Spotlight doesn't index mbox files. It
certainly doesn't index mbox files created by Entourage. Whether Entourage
uses "standard" mbox files or special mbox files, I don't know.