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Can you find email items in Alfred?


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When I search for an email item Alfred will usually find an email that I’ve imported to DEVONthink no problem. However, it doesn’t seem to find email items in mail.app. I don’t necessarily import everything to DEVONthink. Can Alfred find email items in Mail.app directly.

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When I search for an email item Alfred will usually find an email that I’ve imported to DEVONthink no problem. However, it doesn’t seem to find email items in mail.app. I don’t necessarily import everything to DEVONthink. Can Alfred find email items in Mail.app directly.

 

You might find this post helpful. It explains how to include them in the default results (annotated screenshot included :lol: ), and offers a workflow I made for searching Mail.app's emails

 

Cheers  :)

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Thanks

 

I like your workflow. Oddly it turns up some things but not everything. If you go in mail and type the same thing Justice it will find four emails to Justice. If you type in Alfred though Justice as soon as you get past the t it defaults to a Google search. However, if I look for Cameron the most important email turns up for him but if you search in Mail 6 items turn up for him. Do you have any idea why that would be. 

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Thanks

 

I like your workflow. Oddly it turns up some things but not everything. If you go in mail and type the same thing Justice it will find four emails to Justice. If you type in Alfred though Justice as soon as you get past the t it defaults to a Google search. However, if I look for Cameron the most important email turns up for him but if you search in Mail 6 items turn up for him. Do you have any idea why that would be. 

 

That's interesting... I assume it's just because Mail is smarter at searching than my workflow is. Mail may understand that when you type 'Cameron', you want emails from, to, and containing 'Cameron'. My workflow only searches the name of the filename and Spotlight comments.

 

I don't know how to make my workflow as smart as Mail.app  :(

 

David Ferguson probably knows more than I do on this subject. I recommend asking him if you need further assistance.

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Hi,

 

Thanks. That’s good. Often I just want to get a broad overview of a set of email’s I wrote in this case back in the the Dec time-frame around an Apple Case. I could remember a name of a critical person and the em command found the name and with the shift key I saw a case number. I did a search with the case # and a pile of email’s turned up with a piece of critical information - a date and it was December 12 2012. From there it was easy to then generate what I needed to add to a new case around the same issue that i thought was cleaned up but wasn’t. A small thing but important.

 

So this I could have done in mail but it saved me a step - actually a few due to the way mail operates. 

 

I had actually generated the case with Apple engineering Saturday interestingly from Marko’s DEVON workflow. This one is a winner. Most critical email and everything else for that matter I import to DEVONthink. So using Marko’s workflow I was able to find that case #. However, using Vero’s I found it much faster as there was a lot of email’s that didn’t appear critical that I didn’t import. Within less than a minute of Alfred searching I had exactly the information I needed to support the generated case - so we didn’t have to start at square one.

 

So I really like Marko’s DEVON workflow and Vero’s mail workflow. I find I’m replacing Launchbar in my arsenal with Alfred slowly. All the basics I’m finding I’m getting onto no problem. In the case of something that requires a workflow, I like to leave that to the people that know how to program as I definitely don’t LOL! So I peruse the workflow shared forum every so often and see some interesting stuff. Also, one fellow has often asked me to test his workflows as he gets the kinks ironed out of it which I like doing. This iterative process works well for me.

 

So all is good in the land of Alfred. Its making more sense to me. Its actually faster than Launchbar at some things and can do others it can do but I think quicker once you know Alfred’s ways :). It seems it can do more now that I think about it. I think my toolset may change to Alfred, Keyboard Maestro and TextExpander with Launcbar as my backup now.

 

Kerry

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