Does archived email show up in spotlight?

I would like to use EagleFiler to archive old mail. I want to be able to search for the old mail in EagleFiler, but I don’t want search hits from the old mail when I use the system-wide spotlight search.

So, does mail archived in EagleFiler show up in normal spotlight searches?

Second, does any document in the EagleFiler library show up in system-wide spotlight searches? (I assume this is yes).

Thanks.

No.

Yes, all the other files (and EagleFiler notes on both files and messages) do show up in Spotlight, unless you’ve excluded them in System Preferences.

Brilliant.

Can you shed some light on what is being treated differently about mail versus other files, and are there any other distinctions that make some files appear in system-wide spotlight searches versus not.

I believe EagleFiler is placing all mail in an mbox - is that the sole reason it isn’t found by spotlight?

Thanks for the quick response.

Yes, the reason is that (for efficiency and compatibility) EagleFiler stores multiple messages in a single mbox file. Spotlight doesn’t know how to index mbox files, so it ignores them. (Plus Spotlight wants to have one document per file, anyway.)

Thanks.

Spotlight’s loss is my gain. If I wanted those old messages clogging up my spotlight searches I would have left them in mail.app.

Again, thanks.

EagleFiler 1.4 offers the choice of storing e-mail messages in individual files, in case you do want them to be indexed by Spotlight.