Inconsistent SEARCH FUNCTION in Lion Mail

I have a note book Pro with Lion OS X 10.7.2.
Since I have Lion when I use the mail search function, I cannot control my search.
Sometime I can search " by" or "from", sometime I cannot access that way of searching
Some other times I can search by selecting People, Mailbox or subject...
At no time i have the control of choosing the way I want to organize my search
It should exist a search function that would enable to choose the best way to make a search and to refine that search
Any suggestion to control your search?

Don't take this the wrong way, but stop wasting your time. I spent 2 hours at my local Apple store yesterday and at the end of it all was told there was an issue with mail search in Lion and that Apple was aware of it.
I went so far as to bring an identical computer loaded with the same number of mail messages (25,000+) running snow leopard instead of Lion, set the computers side by side and time after time the mail in Leopard worked perfectly while Lion found few if any mail messages at all. For example when we searched the term "computer" search would bring up 2477 found on Snow Leopard and none in Lion. Just one example.
The Apple Genius Bar guy was apologetic and tried all of the following during my 2 hour visit:
Rebuild spotlight
Reinstall Lion
Rebuild Indexes
export mail
import mail
Reset Mail app from
use migration assistant to set up Mail from Leopard to Lion
Remove and rebuild envelope
delete mail plist
Use Terminal to reset indexes
Throw away saved search preferences
No Joy
Funny though how well mail worked perfectly with a few hundred sample emails on computers in store.
Lastly the theory that we agreed on was that perhaps I had too many emails and or attachments in inbox and Lion could not deal with it.
Looking at alternative like Postbox or Thunderbird until fix is implemented by Apple.
Hope this helps.

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Can't do some searches with new Lion Mail program?!

Has Apple changed the search function in Mail with Lion?!
I used to be able to enter a search term, then indicate whether to search things like "Subject" or "Entire Message" or "To" or "From" . This was EXTREMELY useful for quickly narrowing down results.
This functinality now seems to be totally gone?! Or is it just hidden?! Without it, it can make it MUCH MUCH harder to find something?!
Did Apple take away some very useful part of the toolset?!

Type a search term in the search field, and then wait a few seconds. All of the options for searching by category (that apply to that term) will appear. choose the one you'd like.

I updated to Lion and now the Search function in Apple Mail is not working properly

Even though the "All" option is selected, when I type a string in the Mail spotlight search box, the string is not found. But I know for a fact the string is in an email and I've manually found the email (in a folder) and copied and pasted it into the search box. Mail is still not able to find it.
I have also checked to make sure that "Message contains" is the option in the search box. I've noticed that in some previous searches there has been a little arrow dropdown option next to the magnifying glass icon. But that arrow is not showing up consistently...and is not showing up now.
What am I doing wrong?

Ok...here's the steps to fix this as efficiently as possible. I have a whole bunch of mailboxes under "On My Mac" and they have a bunch of mailboxes nested in them. I get my messages into Apple Mail via IMAP. (I don't know if this matters.) The steps below assume you have a similar setup.
1. Hold the Option key down and click the dropdown arrow next to each mailbox that has one. This will cause all nested mailboxes below it to appear.
2. Go to the top of the list of mailboxes under "On My Mac" and highlight the first mailbox. Then hold the Shift key down and highlight the last mailbox in the list. This will cause all of the mailboxes and nested mailboxes to be highlighted.
3. From the menu, select "Mailbox --> Rebuild" and the rebuild process will start.
4. Watch the top of the mail screen to see the message count change as the mailboxes are being rebuilt. Wait until the activity stops before doing the next step.
5. As the mailboxes were rebuilt, many messages were reset as "Unread" even though every message was previously "Read." Make sure the mailboxes you want to affect are still highlighted. Right-click and select "Mark All Messages Read."
That fixed the problem for me.

'Any' Search In Mountain Lion Mail Not Showing Results

Regardless of what I put into a search on 'Any" inside of the mail program absolutely no search results show up at all. Regardless of what I search for. The To and From searches do appear to work.

SOLVED :
Used terminal
sudo mdutil -E /
command to erase and rebuild indicies. Email "any" searches began working sortly thereafter

Search Function over all Mails

Hello community,
I want to know if it is possible to search for a mail over alle folders that i have created and sorted my mails in.
I think one can only search mails within a single folder...
I am using icloud.com on a Windows PC.
Thanks for your help
Nils

You can already search through a playlist.
Help article about it can be found here:
https://support.spotify.com/learn-more/faq/#!/article/Filter-your-playlists
In the desktop app you can also search for a specific playlist instead of scrolling through your list to find it by typing the title of that playlist in the search results. It should then appear under playlists in the search results.

Mountain Lion Mail Program Search Function.

I upgraded my 2nd Generation Air to Mountain Lion. The search function on my mail is not nearly as effective as it was before. I find myself searching on my IPhone or Ipad, then forwarding the mail to my email address so I can open it on my Air. I can't find it with the Search Mail function on the computer, but can find it easily with the other devices.
I've looked in settings and configuration, but can't see anything that would let me go to a different search function.
Any ideas?
Thanks.

I really tried everything but nothing helped.
But finally I solved the problem.
I made a timemachine backup (just for safety reasons).
Then I installed Mountain Lion again over the existing installation.
(I used a USB Stick with Mountain Lion to do that.)
Now everything works great.

The search function on my apple mail is not working.

The search function in Apple mail is not working. When I type in something to search by, the results are not showing up.
I've clicked on "All" on the search requirements to include all of my mailboxes.
I've also tried rebuilding the mailboxes with no results.
Has anyone else had this issue?

Is Spotlight working?

The search function in mail has virtually stopped working

What's going on???? I can no longer find anything using the search function in Apple Mail Version 5.2 (running on OS 10.7.4).
If I put in the name of someone I have exchenged maybe 500 emails with, it only finds one or two, or maybe none. The same with key words. And I can suddenly no longer search for partial email addresses (like @bankofamerica.com).
I tried rebuilding some of my bigger mail boxes, and a) it took a LONG time and b) it didn't help.
I have not made any chenges in my software, and a week ago I seemed to be searching just fine.
Any idea what might have happened and how to fix it?
Thank you!

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then try again to re-index Spotlight. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name or email address, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Lion Mail Search Stopped Working

The search in my Lion Mail doesn't work at all. When you enter some text you get nothing. This is on my Mac Pro. On my Macbook Pro it works. I even deleted all the mail and let it reimport. I even reindexed spotlight. Next step is to remove all the accounts and start over. I stopped using Apple Mail because of this before and chose Thunderbird which works perfect, but Lion Mail came out so I thought to give it a try and it still doesn't work. I have to be able to search.

Brilliant, works every time!
Actually, you were the one who found the solution by trying the following statement:
    set CS_Messages to every message that subject contains "Daily Summary"
Have you any idea why my original script stopped working, just like to know to stop this happening again.
Since the original script has always worked flawlessly on my computer under OS X 10.8.1, the only thing I can think of would be another application interfering with Mail or AppleScript in your system.
By the way, the following version of the script might be somewhat faster when you have a huge number of messages in your mailbox:
set theContents to {}
set theContentsRef to a reference to theContents
tell application "Mail"
    tell mailbox "CS Notepad"
        tell mailbox "Test"
            set CS_Messages to every message that subject contains "Daily Summary"
            repeat with thisMessage in CS_Messages
                copy content of thisMessage to the end of theContentsRef
            end repeat
        end tell
    end tell
end tell
theContents
See the AppleScript Language Guide, Class Reference, list (p. 110 in the PDF version) : “For large lists, it is more efficient to use the a reference to operator when inserting a large number of items into a list, rather than to access the list directly.”
Message was edited by: Pierre L.

Lion mail 5.2 search function

I just switched to Lion and have been disappointed with the Mail app. I'm over 50 and find the new "grayed-out" icons throughout Lion's new graphic scheme really annoying... and Mail is no exception. Ditto the bouncing of lists, texts, etc., at the end of their scrolling range. What purpose is served by this? Why can't they just stop?
Anyway, the main issue I have with Mail is the search function, which seems nearly useless. I can't seem to find a way to search on Subject, Contents or Sender, all of which functions have been vital to my business. I'm not sure what to do about this, because I'm stuck with Lion now and can't go back to Snow.
Can anyone help?

Doesn't work for me. The drop down I get is only the following:
"All/Inbox/Drafts/Sent/Notes/Flagged
trying to search in each of those fields does not bring up the old "Entire Message/Subject/To/From/ etc...fields.
I'm using Lion and it seems that this came on all of the sudden when trying to search in Mail shows NO search box choices. NO Subject / No Entire Message / No From / No To Etc.....
I have multiple machines all running Snow Leopard and only this one machine running Lion but I do not think that Lion was always this way since I updated this machine. I could be wrong. Is this the Lion and Mountain Lion Mail app and I just have not used the Mail Search function on this machine until now?
Anybody know if this is Apple's idea of "slimming down" the existing apps to be more iOS like or is this a malfunction of the most recent security/java update? Either way I hate it and can't find anything without those options. I ordered a T-Shirt it came in the wrong size. Before I could always type in T-Shirt under "Entire Message" and find the right one almost immediately. Now when I try I get the whole inbox it seems. No filtering at all.
Issue? or "New and Improved" from Apple?
I hope this is not the normal behavior for Lion, I already not pleased at the "New and Improved" combination of Search and URL address in the new Safari......It's a joke. Talk about limiting our macs to be more like our phones, geezo before long we will have one search function to use and it will be so time consuming to go thru the results it won't be worth it. If I could remember enough detail to narrow down my results I would not be needing the search function. Of well, thats another feedback letter for Apple i guess.

Mac Lion. Search function does not work in mails.

Hello,
I already wasted several hours trying to find solution for a problem which appeared with Lion, search function does not work, in mail at least.
I was not using Leopard before and I am not a mac expert.
(search function was already bad in the normal it was already bad in the normal 10.7 set up but at least it was working in mac mails).
I tried reindexing via spotlight privacy settings (adding and removing HD) but does not work much better.
I don't want to go to terminal, as as mentioned I don't know enough about mac to try this.
What to do?
Thanks,
C.

Anyone? Any ideas?

Running Lion, mail search function suddenly stopped working

All of a sudden the search function in my Mac mail stopped working. No emails show up when I begin to search in any of me mailboxes. Still able to search in spotlight but not always effective in finding what I'm looking for. Desperately need to fix this as always referring to old emails for work.

You can rebuild your mail search indexes by following these instructions:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mail/3.0/en/14019.html
Cheers,
Rodney

Searching function in mail app in ios7 is not good as before?

I am using 2 ipad with different IOS version 6.x and 7.x, I found that the search function in new ipad is not good as before.
In my old ipad, I can search email by some ways as by Sender, Date of send, Subject or any detail? However, the searching box in new email does not have those function so we can only put anything we can remember. In addition, the search results do not show in order as time by time so it is really hard to find what we want to find among mess of thousand mails in our inbox

I'm having the exact same problem here. I'm in Lion 10.73 running Mail 5.2.
This is very frustrating because the "list view" window, there's an attachement column that show's there's 2 attachments (presumably one image attachment for a signature and one for a pdf)... but in the message window there's no pdf attachment.
Surprisingly I have an iPad3 and the same message is missing the attachment as well.
But then I go online to my webhost's webmail access and the attachment is there.

OS X Lion Mail - search feature

Searching through the thousands of emails on my laptop used to be easy with Snow Leopard. Within seconds I would search through entire messages, or who I sent to, or received from, or by subject. That simplicity seems to have been bleached out of Lion. Is anybody else having trouble with email search on Lion or is it just me?

I found another issue with the search function. I've noticed the search results do not include email messages placed in an archive folder I've created on my mac. Only messages which are located in the actual inboxes and sent items are included in the search items.
I can also confirm that the "from" list is incomplete. I've the idea that only contacts which are listed in the MS Exchange directory (of my university) are listed, in addition to my own contacts. Senders which I haven't saved in my contact list are missing.
Interesting to not is that spotlight is able to find the messages which are not listed via the Mail search.
Another thing: "entire message" does not include sender information: for instance, mails from dropbox only show up if I select "From", but not when I select "entire message". This is counter intuitive in my opinion. BTW, I just see that the term "dropbox" is almost always included in the main text, so it should show up, even if "entire message" does not search through the "From" section.
I find the new search function quite horrible to use. I hope someone is able to point out what I'm doing wrongly.
UPDATE:
I just created a new mailbox and moved a couple of "old" (pre-lion-received) messages which I was not able to find previously into the new mailbox and guess what happened: I now am able to find via the search funciton
UPDATE 2:
I think something went wrong when I upgraded to Lion. I've rebuilded all my old mailboxes and it now works fine. You can do the same by selecting your mailbox and click Mailbox -> Rebuild.
Message was edited by: Morrey

Mail search function - old emails

Just moved to new iMac with OS Lion.
The Mail function used to search the body of the email, but now it does not (apparently). Grrrr
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3610
More importantly, the search function is not looking at my old emails in separate folders. And apparently it is not looking at emails not received by the new computer either. Thus I have no historic email search function, which is annoying.
How can I force Mail to look at and search all the other old email folders?
Thanks.

Ok, I have a fix for this (borrowed from another blog),
Quote:
Quit the Mail app and go to this directory:
~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/
Delete these files:
Envelope Index
Envelope Index-shm
Envelope Index-wal
Restart the Mail app.
And now everything works fine.
Cheers

Inconsistent SEARCH FUNCTION in Lion Mail

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