Mail with boolean operators

I've been using Spotlight to search my emails and can't seem to get it to work with boolean operators. It doesn't seem to return the correct results; missing emails.

Its getting so frustrating. Can anybody help?

I can't directly answer your question StevenH but I have seen quite a lot of info about the net that states that Spotlight is far from being the best Hard Drive search tool available. Also have read that it often misses files in it's search. That's all I can say, sorry. Maybe someone else here will know exactly why those Boolean Operators won't work.

Awh... but I love my spotlight! That's a shame.... Is there anything that could replace it?

By all means continue with Spotlight if it suits your needs. Otherwise you could take the following for a spin:

EasyFind

If you’re a power user, EasyFind also offers a number of advanced features—mentioned above—that are either unavailable in Spotlight or not easily accessible. By using the Wildcards search option, you can use grep-like expression matching. For example, if I want to find files with either Eddy or Eddies in their names, I would search for Edd*. And the operators option lets me use boolean operators such as AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, AFTER, and so on. For example, I could look for older Eddy-related documents by searching for Eddy NOT 2005, which would find documents containing Eddy but not 2005 in the filename.

Click to expand...

I also uncovered the following:

The boolean NOT in Spotlight

EasyFind blows Spotlight out of the water. It has a setting to search for invisibles, doesn't index so nothing is skipped and can even search for package contents.

If it wasn't for potential problems when it's turned off during sofware updates, I would nuke Spotlight permanently.