MailSearch

Why this exists

Mail clients are bad at search. Apple Mail’s built-in search misses messages older than its arbitrary recency window. Gmail’s web search is fast but only for that one Gmail account, and finding text inside a PDF attachment from 2019 is a coin-flip. Outlook’s desktop search regularly forgets your archive exists.

MailSearch is a search engine, not a mail client. It pulls every message from every mailbox you connect, indexes the lot, and answers in milliseconds. Type words you remember from the message — “easyjet barcelona”, “amazon refund”, “invoice anderson” — and the matching email comes up, even if the words live inside an attached PDF.

The index lives on your Mac. No Whiteforge servers see your mail. Tokens never leave your Keychain.

How it works

• Connect a mailbox

  Click + Add Gmail / + Add Outlook and grant access in your browser; click + Add iCloud Mail and paste an app-specific password from appleid.apple.com; or click + Add IMAP for any other IMAP server (BT, Fastmail, Yahoo, your work’s Microsoft 365 on a non-Outlook tenant). All four providers index identically once connected.

• One-click sync

  Click Sync now. MailSearch fetches your most recent 500 messages from that mailbox, parses subjects + senders + recipients + body text + attachment text, and writes the lot to a local SQLite full-text index. Progress streams to the sidebar as it goes.

• Search across everything

  One search box, one set of results, spanning every connected mailbox. Words use AND semantics with prefix matching — type invoi anderson and the invoice from Anderson Consulting comes up immediately, even if the matching text is inside the attached PDF.

• PDF, RTF and plain-text attachments are searchable

  Attachments in those three formats are extracted at index time. A search for words from inside a PDF receipt or RTF report finds the email that delivered them. Image attachments and binary formats are skipped — no text payload to index cheaply.

• Read messages in the app

  Click a result to open the message inside MailSearch. The viewer shows the sender, full date, folder, and the matching snippet with the words highlighted. Full HTML body rendering arrives in a follow-up release.

• Local-only by design

  MailSearch is a search tool with a read-only viewer. It does not reply, send, archive, delete, or otherwise modify your mailbox. Mail goes from your provider straight to your Mac — no Whiteforge servers in the path, no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, ever.

Supported mailboxes

• Gmail

  OAuth via a desktop loopback redirect. Read-only scope (gmail.readonly). Tokens in Keychain; refresh handled automatically.

• Outlook / Microsoft 365

  OAuth via Microsoft’s Mobile and desktop applications platform. Mail.Read + User.Read + offline_access scopes. Tokens in Keychain.

• iCloud Mail

  IMAP over TLS to imap.mail.me.com:993 with an Apple ID app-specific password (generated at appleid.apple.com → Sign-In and Security). Apple doesn’t support OAuth for iCloud Mail, so app-specific is the canonical path.

• Generic IMAP (BT, Fastmail, Yahoo, ...)

  You supply the server hostname, port and credentials. IMAP over TLS, with rustls (no system OpenSSL).

What MailSearch does not do

MailSearch does not reply, send, archive, delete, label, or otherwise modify your mailbox. It is a read-only search engine with a read-only viewer.

MailSearch does not currently render full HTML email bodies in the viewer — the search-results pane shows the matching snippet and the full plain-text body. Sanitised-HTML rendering arrives in a follow-up release.

MailSearch does not index image / video / archive attachments. Only PDF, RTF and plain-text are extracted at index time.

MailSearch does not currently sync incrementally on a schedule — you click Sync now when you want fresh mail. Background indexing arrives in a follow-up release.

Privacy

MailSearch makes outbound network connections by design — it has to, to fetch your mail and to validate your licence key on first activation. Mail connections go to your provider, not to Whiteforge; the licence check goes to LemonSqueezy (our payment processor) once and is not repeated. There are no Whiteforge servers in the data path. There are no analytics, telemetry, or crash reporting in the app.

Tokens (Gmail / Outlook) and app-specific passwords (iCloud / IMAP) live in your macOS Keychain. The full-text index and any cached message bodies live in a SQLite database under ~/Library/Application Support/. See the privacy policy for the full detail.

Requirements

macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later. Apple Silicon (M-series) Macs. Distributed as a Developer ID signed and Apple-notarized disk image — not via the Mac App Store.

Support

For bug reports and feature requests, see the support page. For anything else, email support@whiteforgetech.co.uk.