Integrating Thunderbird into Spotlight

Updated 25 Dec 2007: Updated the new Thunderbird mdimporter link and added a note about Leopard
Updated 25 May 2008: Leopard Integration with spotlight link

I personally like Firefox and Thunderbird, and I've been using it on my Mac. My pet peeve with Thunderbird was that I could not search my emails in spotlight. No longer... I found a post that helped me integrate Thunderbird emails into spotlight. You can see the original post here.

These are the steps to integrate Thunderbird emails into Spotlight (I'm using Thunderbird 2.0.0.6):

1. Download and install the Thunderbird mdimporter. This is a plug-in that tells Spotlight how to index Thunderbird emails.
2. When you unzip it, you should see a folder called Thunderbird.mdimporter. Drag or move this folder to /Library/Spotlight/
3. Run your Thunderbird and goto Thunderbird > Preferences > Advanced > General > Config Editor
4. Type mail.spotlight.enable in the filter box
5. Double click on the mail.spotlight.enable to set the value to true
6. Close Thunderbird, reboot your mac, and start Thunderbird. At this point, Thunderbird will start to create folders that end with .mozmsgs in your Profile. This will take some time, especially if you have thousands of emails.

That should be it. After waiting for quite a while, I started searching and I could see the emails. The emails will appear under the Documents section. However, it seems that sometimes clicking on the search results will launch the Thunderbird mail client, and sometimes it doesn't. I'm not sure why. It might be my email.

Anyway, so far, this is sufficient for me. Makes my searching a whole lot easier. :) Hope this helps...

Note: I realise from forums that for Leopard, you will need Spotlight to enable indexing for System files in order for the Thunderbird indexing to work. I do not have Leopard so I'm unsure if this is true.
I have given up integrating Thunderbird into spotlight in Leopard. Read about my frustrations here.