TUAW Tip: Power searching in Leopard Mail

Over at Mac OS X Hints, johnga1t has discovered that Leopard's Mail.app has a more powerful search functionality than is apparent on the surface. Basically, it seems that Mail.app's search box can leverage some of the power of the new, more sophisticated Spotlight syntax, which means you can now uses fields to limit your searches. The syntax is: keyword from:some_user subject:some_word

So for example you can search for all the emails from me with from:Mat Lu in the search box. And these can be combined. To find all the emails from me with 'philosophy' in the subject line it would be: from:Mat Lu subject:philosophy and so on. One thing I've noticed is that you do need to make sure it searches the "Entire Message."

Apparently the available fields are: from, subject, and email (which searches the email address rather than the name). As one of the commenters at Mac OS X Hints notes, you actually have more options when searching directly from Spotlight (e.g. Boolean operators), but nonetheless, I think this is handy time saving trick.

[via Hawk WIngs]