Erratic spotlight behaviour

Question

Hi all,
Spotlight is behaving very erratically, and it's driving me nuts! I use Hazel, a tool which watches folders and performs actions automatically when new files are added. This (sensibly) uses the spotlight index to detect new/changed files. Unfortunately spotlight does not index all files correctly. I am looking at an example right now, where there are two .mp3 files in a folder, all of the details are the same between the two files, except the track name and file name (e.g. they are two tracks from the same album). One, I can find in spotlight and hence it has triggered my Hazel rule, the other, I cannot find in spotlight and is undetected by Hazel. The files in questions are located on a FAT32 USB hard disk
I've just ran "mdiutil -E" on the drive in question, and it has now picked up the missing file, but I've done that previously so obviously doesn't fix the issue, just builds a one-time, correct index.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Jon

Answer 1

I've had this problem with slight variations since Tiger. Various solutions have been posted, as you've listed, but none have ever worked for me.
This bug really cripples Mail--I've used emails as my personal database for about 15 years, kind of a history log that required zero effort, which worked great in Eudora but Eudora isn't being supported anymore.
After updating to X.5.5, I can search "entire message" for "All Mailboxes" and find everything including emails in the mailbox I was viewing (often finds 60,000 occurences, but doesn't take very long--it's just incredibly tedious to find the one I want from such an enormous set of results). I can also find everything using Spotlight, outside of Mail. But if I am looking at any mailbox, like Inbox, and click on the name of that mailbox to restrict the search to it, then search "entire message" never finds anything at all. Searching for subjects etc works fine.