Spotlight only finds "some" content. That's a big proiblem because you never know what you're missing. That problem exists on the desktop as well as mail. I have verified this on my machine as well as other peoples' computers. And I'm talking about simple search criteria like filenames and standard headers in mail like FROM, TO and SUBJECT.

When searching files you can't set a NOT operand on any of the search criteria. Big minus.

Mail smart folder also have some really odd bugs. For instance, I can have a smart folder with 10 different criteria, all on the subject, with the whole thing set to match ANY. If I add one more criteria set to BODY and type "the" as the match word, it should produce a much bigger smart folder, right? Because in addition to the specific subject matches it will pick up anything with the word "the" in the body. The results? It brings back a handful of messages only. Much LESS than before adding the "the" body criteria.

I also can't stand that the whole folder has to be set to match ANY or ALL criteria. Basically this is an OR operand between all criteria or AND. I want to be able to use both, allowing me to have a few items that MUST be matched and a few which are optional. For instance, a smart folder for all mail from "John" that includes the words "hockey" OR "baseball" in the subject. Can't do that now.

Just recently I was searching for a filename I knew existed on my machine. Not within any hidden or system domain either. It didn't find the file nor a few others that also should have matched my partial text. I located them myself in the finder and opened one. Did the search again. Now it would find the file I opened but not the others. I had to open one at a time in it appropriate application to get Spotlight to recognise them. If it worked 100% 100% of the time or never worked, those two extremes I could deal with. This unknown is a big problem though.

Bruno