MacOS – How to remove people from search in mail app
macosmail.app
How to remove people list when you search in mail app?
Take a look at the picture:
As you can see, there's People section under search box, how can i remove "Service Desk" from appearing here?
Best Answer
I don't think you can remove the people list from search results.
If you search, for instance, for "Service Desk", mail will lookup in any header: From, To, Subject, and other; therefore mail will include previous recipients and contacts.
Solution 1
Be specific about the message header to use in the search.
You can perform the search by adding the keyword "Subject": Subject: Service Desk
Solution 2
Create a smartmailbox like the one in the picture.
In this example the smartmailbox will lookup for all message containing the word "Facebook" excluding this word from sender and recipients.
You will need to double-click the smartmailbox and edit it every time you want to do your custom search.
The difference in autocomplete stems from the fact there is no “Mail knows about”. The lookup happens on two different sets of data:
Autocomplete in search happens on the Spotlight index of all received and sent mails in Mail.app’s database (since version 2 of Mail.app).
Autocomplete on compose happens on Mail.app’s potential recipients list, which is a compound of contacts with an email address in Addressbook and a list of previous recipients stored by Mail.app (a list you can see and edit under Window » Previous Recipients).
Notice the difference: search knows about people you have only received mail from, compose does not. Hence different autocomplete results.
I have struggled with this also (telling spotlight NOT to search in mail etc.)...
The best solution for me so far has been to get in the habit of writing:
-kind:mail
at the end of every search I make in spotlight.
I will admit this isn't a GREAT solution - but it works (and you could probably set a keyboard shortcut to type it for you if you wanted).
Best Answer
I don't think you can remove the people list from search results.
If you search, for instance, for "Service Desk", mail will lookup in any header: From, To, Subject, and other; therefore mail will include previous recipients and contacts.
Solution 1
Be specific about the message header to use in the search.
You can perform the search by adding the keyword "Subject":
Subject: Service Desk
Solution 2
Create a smartmailbox like the one in the picture.
In this example the smartmailbox will lookup for all message containing the word "Facebook" excluding this word from sender and recipients.
You will need to double-click the smartmailbox and edit it every time you want to do your custom search.