How To Use Search Tokens in Lion Mail
Posted: October 15, 2011 by AppleWorld in Labels: How To, Mac OS X
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Apple has completely revamped the Mail application in Lion. Not only are they going for an iPad-influenced user interface, but they've also enabled a searching system that makes finding messages easier through the use of tokens. With tokens, you can search by date, name, message contents, or any combination of these.
To find a message, locate the search bar in the upper right-hand corner of the application. Type in what you remember about the message -- perhaps it’s a person or the subject line --and as you type the search field will offer up a list of options, just like Spotlight. Click on any of these search suggestions to insert a token in the search field.
Many of the available tokens (with the exception of the date) will give you additional options by clicking on the small downward facing arrow beside the term. Here, we typed in a name of someone who has sent us email in the past, so we can either search who it's from, to, or the entire message.
To specify a date, simply type in a month followed by the 4-digit year. Here, we’re searching for emails in March 2011.
Finally, to search for anything else in the message, type in as many other search terms after this token. For our search, we’re trying to find an email from Apple sent in March about iTunes.
And sure enough, there it is: an email about the iOS software update available on iTunes. As you can see, this new search is very powerful, and you can even save your search as a Smart Mailbox by clicking the Save button.
To find a message, locate the search bar in the upper right-hand corner of the application. Type in what you remember about the message -- perhaps it’s a person or the subject line --and as you type the search field will offer up a list of options, just like Spotlight. Click on any of these search suggestions to insert a token in the search field.
To specify a date, simply type in a month followed by the 4-digit year. Here, we’re searching for emails in March 2011.
And sure enough, there it is: an email about the iOS software update available on iTunes. As you can see, this new search is very powerful, and you can even save your search as a Smart Mailbox by clicking the Save button.