Spotlight typically stores its index at the root of the drive. It appears that from a technical point of view, Spotlight and Core Spotlight are not all that different. These additional copies of the private data contained in mail messages will not benefit from SIP / “Full Disk Access” protection. Power users and third-party applications are likely to create their own search indexes. In truth, the new situation is likely to undo privacy benefits provided by the “Full Disk Access” protection introduced with macOS Mojave. This may appear to be a cautious approach that favors security and privacy over application interoperability and productivity. Yet Apple all but overrides the user’s choice by still not allowing that application access to the search index for Mail messages. The user can thus decide to trust an application with access to his/her Mail messages. MacOS Mojave and Catalina have an option to allow applications to access application data like Mail, Messages, etc. At every turn, the system asks the user whether to allow or deny access to potentially sensitive data. On macOS, Apple likes to put the user in the driver’s seat. The decision not to allow third-party applications access to Mail searches steps out of line with Apple’s current efforts on privacy. a mail to self to “turn on screen sharing”.Īpple has removed this public API without prior notice of deprecation and without providing a replacement. Automation tools could set up actions to run upon receiving email messages. This allowed applications and scripts to work with mail without duplicating the effort of connecting to mail servers. Spotlight also provided notifications when new mail was downloaded. It gave access to messages, their subject, sender and recipient names, as well as a wealth of other well-documented metadata. Spotlight was the de-facto API for accessing Mail messages. The removal of Mail messages from the Spotlight index does not only affect file search tools. This puts searching for Apple Mail messages off-limits to third-party applications, scripts, and automation tools. Even though the Apple Mail application still stores mail messages as individual files, it has moved indexing from Spotlight to Core Spotlight. This became a problem with the release of macOS 10.15 Catalina. The documented API allows only for searching data owned by the application that does the searching. The other reason HoudahSpot and Tembo have not added support for Core Spotlight, is that Apple has yet to provide public API to allow third-party applications to search Core Spotlight. These applications expect to work with files that have a name and a path, can be tagged, can be copied, etc. Core Spotlight is typically used to index items not available as individual files. HoudahSpot and Tembo, however, are designed as file search and organization tools. Up until recently, Core Spotlight was of no interest to HoudahSpot and Tembo. Some third-party applications have also found it easier to add support for Core Spotlight than to adapt their data structures to work with Spotlight. Such items still appear in the Spotlight window by way of Core Spotlight. This is of much less interest than the individual notes. With that, a file search tool can at best find the file that holds all notes. We were sad to see this information moved to databases. A few years back, Safari history items and Apple Notes were saved as individual files. In recent years, Apple has migrated a few system applications to use monolithic storage rather than individual files. This reversal of roles allows Core Spotlight to index any kind of data. Instead, applications actively submit data to Core Spotlight for indexing. Core Spotlight does not watch for data or files to appear. Thus such applications either have to change their data storage to fit Spotlight’s requirements or resort to tricks to get their data into Spotlight.Ĭore Spotlight is a more recent addition. Such data items cannot be indexed by Spotlight. For “shoebox” applications, it is often more natural to store data items in a single file or database rather than use one file per data item. The fact that Spotlight works only with files can be a problem for some applications. Whenever a file is modified, the Spotlight engine calls upon the appropriate importer plug-in to read metadata and text content from the file. Spotlight was introduced with OS X 10.4 Tiger. Recent versions of macOS use two indexing technologies to power local searches in the Spotlight window: Spotlight and Core Spotlight. It rather discusses technical background and ethical considerations. It does not provide a solution or workaround for Mail searches on macOS Catalina. Note: This blog post strays away from our usual focus on tips & tricks.
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