At work, I moved to a brand spanking new Macbook Pro. Yeehaw! But in the migration of my old data, Spotlight search over my Thunderbird e-mails no longer worked. This was a big hindrance as I archive e-mail by stashing it in Thunderbird local folders. Thunderbird search is getting better, but I’ve got LaunchBar muscle memory for shooting off Spotlight searches. In effect, I underwent partial institutional memory loss.
After an epic hunt across the Interwebs, I finally managed to find a solution to enable Thunderbird Spotlight indexing thanks to GetSatisfaction. Suffice it to say it involves gnarly file permission tweaking.
Then I got to thinking, wouldn’t it be great to limit Spotlight searches to just e-mail? Gotta be a way to do that right? Turns out Spotlight supports a number of keywords to match various file types. kind:email gets both Thunderbird and Outlook messages. Handy!