spotlight and mail (YMMV)
like many quicksilver enthusiasts, i hardly ever touch spotlight. others have posted elsewhere about how spotlight is needed to index certain things on your drive, but it didn’t sink in until i recently realized that nothing was coming up when i searched for terms i knew were in mails in a particular folder. then i realized, i had turned spotlight indexing of mail off, forgetting that you need it even to search from within mail. but as it happens, it’s not enough to check off “mail messages” in the spotlight prefs (see pic at left). that will allow you to see results from an actual spotlight search, but not from within mail. if, like me, you’ve told spotlight to exclude everything from it’s index (turning spotlight “off”), you’ll need to go back and exclude just the things you don’t want indexed, excepting your Mail folder in ~Library. you can do that from the “Privacy” tab in spotlight prefs, like this:
it’ll take a few minutes, but well worth it. spotlight doing just what you need it to and nothing else. happy hunting.
