The .olm archive Viewer offers find functionality as of Olminator v2.60. You can search for individual email, calendar, contacts or notes items in your archive based on certain item properties being equal or similar to search terms you are specifying. And if you're lucky, you not only search, but you actually find what you're looking for.
Given the transient nature of your fiddling around with this .olm archive of yours, it's probably not worth indexing it through your Apple Mac's Spotlight search. Instead, Olminator implements just a brute-force "ad hoc" search which doesn't require upfront indexing, but comes at the cost of a performance overhead by repeatedly scanning through the entire .olm archive whenever you try to find something. But for what you're up to with Olminator, that's probably a sufficient approach. And it's still faster than manually looking for that blueberry muffin receipe that your grandma sent you 8 years ago...
In the upper left corner of the Viewer tab, to the right of the Folder header, you'll recognize a little magnifying glass icon. Clicking this icon will open the Find bar which will be placed above the Viewer's folder and table view.
By clicking the magnifying glass icon on the left of the Find bar, you can close the Find bar again.
Once you select a folder in the Viewer's folder list and this folder contains emails, calendar appointments, contact information or notes, you'll see the text "Find [type of items in selected folder] matching" in the Find bar.
To the right of this you'll find a circled plus icon. Whenever you click this icon, you'll get another search field consisting of a property picker and a text entry field. The field picker allows you to select which of an item's properties you want to search. And the text entry field allows you to specify some free text that the item's property shall match. You can remove an added search criteria again by clicking the circled minus icon to the right of each text entry field. Which properties are available for searching depends on the selected folder's content – emails have other search fields than contacts. Olminator remembers your most recent search criteria per content type.
Hint: You can search for up to 4 properties at once.
Whenever you change a property name or a search text – and then hit the Return key or press the Find! button on the Find bar –, the currently selected folder gets searched against your latest search criteria. Depending on the complexity of your search criteria and the number of items in the currently selected folder, this can take several seconds.
Hint: If you have clicked a column title for sorting (e.g. the search match column), you'll see the little blue sorting indicator circling until the search has finished.
Olminator applies all search properties with an and logic, i.e. an item that matches all of the criteria you entered (e.g. a certain From: address and a certain Subject: line), will be considered a better match than an item that only matches some or none of your search criteria.
Olminator assigns a percentage from 0% to 100% to each item in the selected folder based on how well the item matches your criteria. It then displays an additional column in the table view (with a magnifying glass icon as column title) where this percentage is displayed graphically with a bar representing the percentage: a green bar represents values above 90%, an orange bar is used for percentages between 80% and 90%, a gray bar for anything below 80%. The length of the bar is proportional to the percentage, too.
Hint: You can of course sort this table column to get good matches to the top and bad matches to the bottom, for example. You can also filter the table based on this column – enter a percentage value into the filter field and you'll get only those items displayed who have an equal or greater percentage for the search.
Caveat: There is one special search properties which is the Any: property. Please use those cautiously. While all other search criteria are applied by reading an item's corresponding property value and comparing just this one value against the respective search pattern, the Any: property will run the given search pattern against all of the item's properties! This is compute and hence time intensive. Use only if you see no other option. A similar warning applies to the Body: property which may be lots of data (like an HTML-based email body) to scan.
In order to determine how well an item's property matches your search criteria, the following rule applies:
Each item of the currently selected folder will be matched and scored against each search criteria you specify. Each criteria will result in one score. The item's score is then calculated as the average of all its individual scores.
Example: If you have 3 search criteria specified and an item has 3 exact matches for those 3 criteria, it'll score 100% for each and the item's average will be 100%+100%+100%/3 equals 100% – i.e. a perfect match. And item, in contrast, where all 3 search criteria only deliver a fuzzy match of, say, 70%, 50% and 13% will end with an overall score of 70%+50%+13%/3 equals 44%. You get the point.
