Mail and mail search horrible since 'upgrade' to 7.5.2

Question

no idea what cat i'm dealing with. went from 7.2.x (might have been 11, can't remember) to 7.5.2. this whole feline thing is beyond me , like going to starbucks and being supposed to order a vente.  i get large.
getting used to the new offerings on search (which i imagine they think are better, i'm dubious). the problem is, while they help you narrow in they circumscribe your choices.
if you are looking for ralph waldo emerson but might have emails with and without his middle name it doesn't just allow you to populate the 'from' search with "emerson".  it insists on offering you a specific person, and if the mail program has not identified these multiple personalities as one entity then you have to search each individually.
ditto for the subject search. it offers you very specific subjects but suppose i just want to find a word in the subject and not a specific subject title?
although generally it offers you the less helpful option to choose entire message which, many of my searches aren't even offering that option anymore. maybe that is because it doesn't see those words in any email but i know they are there.  it often skips over emails that i know have the required word in them or in the subjec.  This is just driving me crazy.
may be some kind of an indexing problem but i have no idea how it indexes or searches.
i tried the rebuild command and that slightly improved results but did not fix the fact that it ignores some emails that have the search indecie in them. and itt simultaneously threw away my last three weeks of emails.  they are still out there on my providers server, but i can't get it to repropagate into the email program.  when i check mail it just gets new mail but not the mail sitting there that it does not have. maybe it put it somewhere and still has it, or maybe it informed my email provider that it had already downloaded the email to this computer so it won't do it again even though there is no version of that email currently in my inbox.
and i'm not sure what else it did.  i used to have 89000 emails in the count showing next to my inbox in the left column (although i'm never clear if that number was the total or the unread) and now I have 49000 although i don't notice any other date range or obvious category of missing emails, who knows.
I used to think that mail kicked *** for keeping track of and finding emails in this large archive.  i'm always looking back to things i ordered 3 years ago to order them again, etc.  it has just been abyssmal since the upgrade. i have occasionally pushed my onboard memory because this is an Air with 64MB storage. I'm using 64 GB low profile cruzer "fit" usb memory for all my documents and i have plenty of space on there but no idea if i could move the target email folder off the internal HD and tell mail how to find it.  This would help prevent my occasional low memory issues.
in any event, never had these troubles when i was running 7.2 .  Didn't even know it would 'upgrade' ???? Mail when I got the later version because some program said it would not run with 7.2.  Mail is only the half of what i hate about 7.5. But it is today's problem so i'll try to keep my bellyaching on one topic.
thanks,
brian

Answer 1

search does not find messages that meet the criterion. it finds some but not others. i haven't been able to detect a pattern.
the search funtion itself has been kludgy from the get go with this update forgetting the learn curve for the 'improvements'
sometimes it won't even let me put a search in for entire document.
i've tried "rebuild" command and that got me a few more results but not complete and lost 3 weeks of email somewhere. (it is a recent 3 weeks, still on the server of my mail provider but i can't get the program to repropogate it.
basically it hasn't been sound since i upgraded a year ago and i've just been living with it but it is really getting intolerable when i need to find emails i know exist and it can't find them.  better handling of large volumes of mail is one of the reasons i use the mac in the first place.
thanks,
brian