I’m searching in finder for a pdf with specific details. How can I exclude Mail and attachments from the search? I was hoping to use “-kind:mail” however it still shows attachments. Any ideas?
Try using the word NOT instead of the minus-sign. The minus-sign should work, though.
Finder search uses both kind:email and kind:emails so you could try excluding both terms.
I’ve found Finder search to be occasionally, randomly persnickety which is why I never use it any more, in favor of HoudahSpot (which utilizes Spotlight’s back-end)
So I was hoping that would work. Here’s a generic search term that I put into spotlight “pdf -kind:mail”
However, search results still include mail attachments. I think I want to exclude mail attachments specifically. Can HoudahSpot do that? I would prefer not adding any additional expenses at the moment. Thanks.
HoudahSpot utilizes the Spotlight infrastructure so I’m guessing not. What you could do is restrict your search to specific folders, excluding Mail (whose contents I believe reside in Library)