Spotlight not able to search email archive

[thomahawk]

Hello Mac friends

All couple years (usually when I change to a new Mac) I store all old emails in a folder on an external volume. They are folders with .emlx files and all the attachments (as copied over from the library folder). Last I was on Mojave and that worked, mostly I used EasyFind to search for content of emails.

I am now on a new Macbook Air with Monterey 12.5.1 and neither Spotlight nor EasyFind bring up any .emlx emails from my archive folder.

No one knows why on the Apple Forum.

The support from EasyFind responded

An .emlx file has base64 enclded data, not the text as you see it displayed, so it cannot be found in a contents-based search.

But I find that may not necessarily be the case, because Mojave worked just fine with the .emlx files from before. And I can still now in Monterey select an .emlx email and preview it pressing spacebar, I do not understand what would prevent Spotlight from looking into this same content.

Any suggestions?

 

[krs]

I don't know much about .emlx files, but I think the EasyFind reply is correct.

I use FAF - when I search for .emlx files I get lots of hits - they are all a 6 digit number.emlx
When I open that xxxxxx.emlx file I get the email, but when I then useFAF to search using that emails subject title, I get nothing.

 

[thomahawk]

I have tried FAF Find Any File. It does not fins anything either.

When I understand you correctly, your search for filetype .emlx gets them listed? But searching for their content shows nothing.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

I don't have an answer to your query, but do understand that hitting the spacebar to preview a file causes macOS to actually open the file (if supported) to show the contents.

Search tools are doing what's similar to going to the Terminal and typing something like "cat <file>" which basically dumps the contents of the file to the screen. If the file is a plain old text file, you'll see the contents, if a binary file, you'll see gibberish.

 

[krs]

I have tried FAF Find Any File. It does not fins anything either.

When I understand you correctly, your search for filetype .emlx gets them listed? But searching for their content shows nothing.

Yes, that is correct.
But the listing of the files is just in the format 123456.emlx, so pretty much useless for your purposes.
I wonder if there is some application that will export those files, read the subject title and replace that in text for the 123456 identifier.

The only app that comes up on my Mac for this file type is Apple Mail.
Maybe you can set up another separate Apple Mail account, drag the emlx files into that and they will show up with the subjet in text and search on that.