Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Getting Spotlight to index Thunderbird e-mails


spotlight thunderbird



Ok, I'm going to consolidate how to do this in a bunch of easy steps:



  • Download Thunderbird 2

  • Download Mozilla Mdimporter

  • Get Thunderbird all set up how you want it

  • Unpack the Mozilla Mdimporter and leave the uncompressed file on your desktop where it's easy to find

  • Press F11 to clear your screen so that you can see your desktop



  • Double-click your hard drive icon

  • Click "Library" (I'm assuming you're in column view here, so if you're not, you should probably just switch to it)



  • Click "Spotlight"

  • Drag the Mozilla Mdimporter file (probably named "Thunderbird" with no extension) into the Spotlight folder

  • Close the Finder window

  • Hit F11 again to restore everything

  • Open Thunderbird

  • Go to the "Thunderbird" menu

  • Select "Preferences"

  • Click the "Advanced" icon

  • Click the "General" tab

  • Click the "Config editor" button next to "Advanced Configuration"

  • Scroll down to "mail.spotlight.enable" -- click it and change it to "true"

  • Shut down Thunderbird

  • Restart your computer

  • Launch Thunderbird

  • If everything is working correctly, then you did everything correctly

  • Give the computer 30 minutes to do some indexing and enter in some search terms from an e-mail into Spotlight -- you should see the results show up as "Mail"



As with all of these sorts of things that I post, your mileage may vary and I'm happy to help with an further questions.



Some sources that I pulled information from:



Link -- dennis.ca has a post on how to do this with more detail than mine



Link -- MacOSXHints has a thread about this and though it's about the Thunderbird 2 beta, I don't think that anything's really changed 



Thunderbird image from Max Boss  


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