Apple Mail Search

Search Apple Mail.app emails instantly via SQLite. ~50ms vs 8+ minutes with AppleScript.

Why This Exists

Apple Mail's AppleScript bridge enumerates every message object in memory before doing anything. At 100K+ emails, it just hangs — indefinitely. This has been broken for years and Apple hasn't fixed it.

Setup

Follow the instructions in references/install.md to install the mail-search script to your PATH. The script source is embedded there for portability.

Requires Full Disk Access for Terminal/shell to read ~/Library/Mail/.

Usage

mail-search subject "invoice"              # Search subjects
mail-search sender "@amazon.com"           # Search by sender email
mail-search from "John"                    # Search by sender display name
mail-search to "[email protected]"     # Search sent mail
mail-search unread                         # List unread emails
mail-search recent 7                       # Last 7 days
mail-search date-range 2025-01-01 2025-01-31  # Date range
mail-search attachments                    # Emails with attachments
mail-search thread 12345                   # Full conversation thread
mail-search body 12345                     # Read email body text
mail-search open 12345                     # Open email in Mail.app
mail-search stats                          # Database statistics

Options

-n, --limit N    Max results (default: 20)
-j, --json       Output as JSON
-c, --csv        Output as CSV
-q, --quiet      No headers
--db PATH        Override database path
--no-copy        Query live DB (faster, slight risk if Mail.app writes simultaneously)

Examples

# Morning inbox check — unread as JSON for cron processing
mail-search unread --json | jq '.[].subject'

# Find supplier emails
mail-search sender "@example.com" -n 50

# Read the actual email body
mail-search body 116519

# Thread view — see full conversation
mail-search thread 116519

# Export last month to CSV
mail-search date-range 2026-02-01 2026-02-28 --csv > feb_emails.csv

# Quick stats
mail-search stats

How It Works

Queries Mail.app's internal Envelope Index SQLite database directly at:

~/Library/Mail/V{9,10,11}/MailData/Envelope Index

Safety: By default, copies the DB to a temp file before querying so there's no risk of corruption while Mail.app is running. Use --no-copy to skip this if you need raw speed.

Epoch detection: Auto-detects whether your DB uses Unix epoch or Apple CoreData epoch (offset by 978307200 seconds). Works correctly on both.

Body reading: The body command finds the .emlx file on disk and extracts plain text (falls back to stripped HTML). Requires python3.

Key Tables

• messages — Email metadata (dates, flags, read status, foreign keys)
• subjects — Subject lines
• addresses — Email addresses and display names
• recipients — TO/CC/BCC mappings
• attachments — Attachment filenames and types
• mailboxes — Folder/mailbox structure

Limitations

• Read-only — cannot compose or send (use AppleScript for that; single-message sends work fine)
• Metadata + body — bodies require the .emlx file to exist on disk (may be purged by Mail.app for old messages)
• Apple Mail only — doesn't read Outlook, Spark, etc.
• macOS only — requires ~/Library/Mail/ directory structure

Advanced: Raw SQL

For custom queries beyond what the CLI offers:

sqlite3 -header -column ~/Library/Mail/V10/MailData/Envelope\ Index "
SELECT m.ROWID, s.subject, a.address,
       datetime(m.date_sent, 'unixepoch') as date
FROM messages m
JOIN subjects s ON m.subject = s.ROWID
LEFT JOIN addresses a ON m.sender = a.ROWID
WHERE s.subject LIKE '%your query%'
ORDER BY m.date_sent DESC
LIMIT 20;
"

Credits

Inspired by steipete's original apple-mail-search concept and tyler6204's safe-copy approach. This version adds body reading, thread support, epoch auto-detection, sent mail search, and bundles the actual executable script.

License

MIT