Perhaps I’ve missed something (it’s been a tough old day!) but I felt I should say something in case anyone else encounters the same thing.īut none of that affects my level of gratitude – I’m genuinely very thankful to you for illuminating how easily my issue could be solved by changing an obscure application preference. The screen cap provided shows the “Fornat> Use the Format menu to choose settings for an open document” is already toggled from “Rich text” to “Plain text” but this wasn’t the case in my “TextEdit> Preferences” until I amended it when my save dialog remained unchanged from beforehand. You do that under your Mac’s Preferences > Spotlight settings. If you do not already have Spotlight indexing your messages, you may want to turn that on (or, you may not.read on). I’ve only just bought my first MacBook so in some ways I’m new to this (despite having first used a Mac decades ago) hence I’m not sure whether another step was necessary because of a change in OS or a difference between Mac and MacBook – or maybe this page hasn’t displayed correctly for me and I’ve not seen allot step 1 in your above method. At this point you can do a search for a text string within your message archives if you have Spotlight indexing your messages.

Thanks for putting this online, Akshay, I’d never have worked it out independently.

Search for text on mac