Alfred no longer searching emails

[tjluoma]

Same… I don't see any evidence of that on Twitter, their website, or Google News.

 

 

[dhanya]

I’ll forward their email. Which I’d should I forward it to? The email is for the beta version download, so that might help

[Vero]

6 hours ago, yashodhankhare said:

I’ll forward their email. Which I’d should I forward it to? The email is for the beta version download, so that might help

 

You can forward it to our info@ address  Thanks!

 

Cheers,
Vero

[dhanya]

Done, check your email

[Vero]

@yashodhankhare Thanks for sharing this - it was interesting to look into how they're doing it.

 

They've chosen to create a Mail plugin, which uses a private plugin API. This means that it's subject to disappearing at any time, and isn't supported or documented by Apple. 

 

Unfortunately, Apple still doesn't offer a supported, reliable way to search Mail at this time.

[dhanya]

How is this going to go live if Apple doesn't support it? I am asking, not questioning, lest you misunderstand. And can we not do the same?

 

[Vero]

1 hour ago, yashodhankhare said:

How is this going to go live if Apple doesn't support it? I am asking, not questioning, lest you misunderstand. And can we not do the same?

 

It looks like Houdah is using a plugin within Mail to provide search results. Apple doesn't actually provide a public API for this, and they don't officially support Mail plugins.

 

Using unsupported or private APIs means that any changes made by Apple can kill the feature at any time; Hacks often quickly prove themselves to be unreliable as Apple make regular changes to macOS.

 

I don't want to detract from Houdah's choice to add it, but there are no features in Alfred relying on hacks, which is why you can expect Alfred to be stable and predictable. As such, this isn't something we'll be adding until Apple make it legitimately possible.

 

Cheers,
Vero

[tjluoma]

On the Mac, where apps do not require Apple’s approval to be sold (outside of the Mac App Store), if you can find a way to accomplish something using a private API (which is “something which exists, but which Apple does not intend for the public to use, and therefore does not document or offer any support for”).

 

However, building a tool like this is like building a house on sand. Apple can change that private API at any time which may break your “solution” because it relies on something that Apple does not consider itself responsible for supporting/maintaining. For example, it could work in 15.6.7 but break in 15.6.8 and any bug reports to Apple would likely be ignored because you were doing something they never intended for you to do.

 

Even with “supported” Mail.app plugins, each major update of macOS almost always disables plugins which have not specifically been verified for that version of macOS, meaning that plugin developers have to be vigilant to stay on top of last-minute changes, etc.

 

I think it is fair to say that the "market" of available Mail.app plugins has gone down dramatically over the past several years, with several plugins being abandoned as developers decided it was no longer worth it to try to maintain them. There are still a few out there, but (I believe) not nearly as many as there used to be.

 

All of which is to say that Houdah has apparently decided to do something which may work, but is going to require them to devote a lot of developer-hours to create and maintain it, all the while never knowing if the whole thing is going to have the rug pulled out from under them in some future release of macOS.

 

And, although I don't speak for Alfred, I can also imagine that this is not something that they would want to do, because it would be a lot of work and might break at any moment, but once they offer it, customers will expect that it will be offered and supported (by Alfred) for all eternity. Therefore it would make much more sense to say "If Apple has worked this hard to prevent us from doing this, we're not going to do it unless they give us an officially sanctioned option to do it."

 

IMO.

 

(and Vero posted just before I did, and I should have just waited for their reply anyway.

Edited October 27, 2020 by tjluoma

[dhanya]

Thanks for enlightening me. For me the email search was THE feature until it disappeared. Anyway, thats that.