[xia]

Is there a way to search a particular text (e.g., an IP address) from the long headers of all emails in a mail box inside Mail? I found that one could open one email at a time and showed the long headers; but not sure how to search the box for a match.

Thanks.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by xia 

Is there a way to search a particular text (e.g., an IP address) from the long headers of all emails in a mail box inside Mail? I found that one could open one email at a time and showed the long headers; but not sure how to search the box for a match.

Thanks.

How about grepping through your offline cache at the file system level?

[xia]

There must be a way to search the long headers in all emails. They are just simple text. In fact, you can use a text editor to open each one in the Mail folder to look at them. But I just do not know how to search them one box at a time; not one email at a time.

[besson3c]

I just gave you a way, no?

[andi*pandi]

Perhaps you could explain it a bit more indepth?

Is grep an app, or do you need to do the command line thing in Terminal? Where do you find the cache?

[besson3c]

Sure!

Grep is a command line based search tool you can use in your Terminal. The cache for OS X Mail is in your home directory -> Library -> Mail. To search for some headers in all of your email accounts, try:

grep -r "text to search" ~/Library/Mail

if you want to search a specific email account you can add this to the end of that path. Spaces will need to be entered like this:

"~/Library/Mail/My\ account" (with quotes)

[P]

Or use the excellent Textwrangler, which includes grep, to do the same thing without the Terminal.

[xia]

Thanks besson3c and all! grep works, although not very 'conveniently'. I guess that some hex/binary editors should also work.