Rocketbox speeds up Mail.app search

Rocketbox from Central Atomics is a replacement for the built-in search engine of Apple's Mail.app. While Mail.app's search works fine for simple queries and even started supporting more advanced search operators, more complex ones, especially those combining contents from several specific fields, are definitely lacking. Plus, with a database of tens of thousands of messages search easily bogs down and won't deliver results for several seconds.

Enter Rocketbox, addressing both the more complex search operations and the search speed. It comes as a plugin with an installer and, upon relaunching Mail.app after installing, will index your existing mail messages for its own index. This process took about 20 minutes on my MacBook Pro with 120,000+ email messages on my hard-drive.

I am not a huge fan of filing my email into a plethora of folders. I archive into a catch-all "Archive" folder using Mail Act-On. Due to the constraints of the built-in search, my search results were usually pretty broad and hardly ever delivered results specific to my queries. With Rocketbox I can quickly drill down by account, reply status, attachment, and date range.

Rocketbox is free to try and $14.95 to buy.