Restrict spotlight search to Entourage only?

B

BB

Is it possible to do a spotlight search that looks only for Entourage items?
Either by running the search from within Entourage (like you can do in Apple
Mail) or by qualifying the search with some keyword or something?

-Bo
 
M

Michel Bintener

Apple stores its iApp data in several locations:

* Mail: ~/Library/Mail
* Address Book: ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook
* iCal: ~/Library/Application Support/iCal

I suppose that adding these folders to Spotlight's privacy list (in the
System Preferences) will prevent it from indexing the respective
application's data. As I've said, I haven't tried it, so it might work, but
it might also not work. Give it a try.

Michel
 
B

BB

I must explain what I really meant :)

I want to make a search that looks for Entourage items only, not documents,
not pictures, not applications. Just Entourage items.

In Apple Mail there is a search box. When I use it the search is limited to
Apple Mail, but the search is made by use of the spotlight engine.

I think that it's also possible from the system wide spotlight search box to
use certain qualifiers to limit the search to a particular document type.
What kind of qualifier would make Spotlight search for Entourage stuff only?

-Bo
 
M

Michel Bintener

Hi Bo,

ah, okay, it's much clearer now. I don't think it's possible to have
Spotlight look for *any* Entourage item, I think you need to be more
specific during the search, i.e. tell it to look for calendar items, mail
messages etc. If you create a new smart folder in the Finder, use the "Kind"
criterion, select "Other" from the list, and then enter Microsoft Entourage
into the Find field. You should see a number of Entourage items, such as
"Microsoft Entourage Message Pointer" etc.

Alternatively, you could instruct Spotlight to look only in the following
folder (~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft), as this folder contains a
mirrored version of Entourage's database, and any item found in this folder
is bound to be an Entourage item. In this case, there's no need to specify
any "Kind", as above, unless you really want to.

Hope this helps.

Michel
 
A

Andy Ruff

In my spare time, I'm working on a quick little app that will do this for
you. It's certainly not polished, but it will do the job. I haven't a
timeframe for when I'll get this out the door.

If you're familiar with Mac programming, it's fairly easy using either
MDQuery or NSMetadataQuery objects. You just have to create a query with
the following in the query syntax:

(kMDItemContentType == "com.microsoft.entourage.virtual.message") ||
(kMDItemContentType == "com.microsoft.entourage.virtual.task") ||
(kMDItemContentType == "com.microsoft.entourage.virtual.event") ||
(kMDItemContentType == "com.microsoft.entourage.virtual.contact") ||
(kMDItemContentType == "com.microsoft.entourage.virtual.group") ||
(kMDItemContentType == "com.microsoft.entourage.virtual.note")

You can see this in action if you create a Smart Folder in the Finder,
select "Other..." from the criteria drop-down, choose "Raw Query" in the
list of possible criteria, and past the above inside. Then just add an
additional query for a field like "Name" and enter the name you are
searching for.

I will note that the Finder does some strange things with Entourage items in
Smart Folder results, so this is of limited use. I'm explanining this more
to demonstrate what could be done in the future rather than what's there
today.

-Andy

--
Andy Ruff
MacBU Program Management
Entourage Weblog: http://blogs.msdn.com/entourage/

This posting is provided ³AS IS² with no warranties, and confers no rights.
 
B

BB

Great! Thanks!

I think this is something like I wanted. Mostly I look for e-mails so
restricting to one type is not a problem.

Bo
 
P

Pitch

Hi Bo,

What you're asking for is what I think many of us are wanting in a
future version of Spotlight. Currently, Spotlight makes it hard to
narrow the search, like you're requesting, in an easy, fast way.
Commnand-F will give more options, but it's still pretty
time-consuming. I remember an OS9 program, called UltraFind, and its
coolest feature was the ability to quickly find only items from a
certain application. For me, when I'm searching for something in my
drive, I almost always know/remember the program it was written in. So
"Search by Application" was UltraFind's coolest feature. (I think it
did this via Type and Creator fields). When I talk to people about what
they want in Spotlight, that seems to be the main feature they're
asking for, and it's behind your own question as well: "Just find stuff
made by Entourage!" I agree, that'll be a great day when Spotlight does
this.
 
P

Pitch

In Spotlight, type "kind:email" after your search criteria. Spotlight
will, I think, only bring up stuff that's in emails. Not sure yet about
Calendar, Tasks, and other items.
 
C

Chris Ridd

Apple stores its iApp data in several locations:

* Mail: ~/Library/Mail
* Address Book: ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook
* iCal: ~/Library/Application Support/iCal

I suppose that adding these folders to Spotlight's privacy list (in the
System Preferences) will prevent it from indexing the respective
application's data. As I've said, I haven't tried it, so it might work, but
it might also not work. Give it a try.
Click to expand...

I did that with ~/Library/Mail, and now the only "Mail message" results I
get are from Entourage.

Cheers,

Chris
 
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