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The emails focus primarily on Tiger's Spotlight search feature, and how far it was in advance of similar functionality in Microsoft's Vista/Longhorn OS.

'Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store,' wrote Microsoft's Lenn Pryor, former Director of Platform Evangelism. 'I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and ... my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was f***ing amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.'

Jim Allchin co-president of the company's Platform Products and Services Group was just as impressed.

'I don't believe we will have search this fast,' he wrote.

The Spotlight discussion is followed by some slightly bizarre

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bickering over Tiger install DVDs.

'I hate to give up my DVDs, and I know Lenn [Pryor] doesn't want to give it up either,' wrote Vic Gundotra. '(If I send you mine, can you promise to get them back to me unscratched?)'

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was released the following April; Vista will be available to all PC users at the end of this month, having been released to business users in Novemeber last year, the next-generation WinFS file system mentioned in the emails having been ditched, though the Spotlight-style search remains.

The emails were submitted as evidence in the Iowa antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, where plaintiffs are trying to demonstrate that Microsoft overcharged consumers for its software, and includes the third Allchin missive to have come under scrutiny.

The first gained widespread publicity after Allchin said that were he not working for Microsoft, he would buy a Mac, a remark he later said had been taken out of context. The second reflects Microsoft's despair at the attempts of portable music player makers to design a device that matches Apple's iPods.