Mail search issue

In Mail.app, search behaves strange: When I type in e.g. "dropbox support", the related e-mails are shown in the left column. But as soon as I select "Persons" or "Header", all search results are gone. E.g., I am looking for all e-mails from John Doe. I type in "John Doe": they're there. I select John Doe as "Sender": all results are gone. The left column is blank.
Is this a bug? Am I the only one with this issue?
Thank you!

hi Blue,
I've got the same problems with Mail. Also, it disconnects me from my incoming mail server randomly. I checked with service provider and hosting company and both are working fine. It seems a software problem.
BTW - if you clean install and have disc 1 = ***-5736-A nothing will happen and will continue to exhibit the same problems.

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Mail search issues

After upgrading to Lion, I'm having problems searching mail. Very few results comeback, when I know there are much much more. I have turned to signing in to my works gmail account for searchs since Mail is not finding 1/10 of the emails I know exisit.
JohnS

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- Try there, and while it is harder now to isolate a Mail subforum you will find issues with Lion.
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HT5361 Mail Search Issues

In the 10.7 version of mail when you searched your inbox it showed you the sender in bold, the same way messages appear in your inbox.
In the 10.8 version when you search it shows you your name on ALL messages unless you are CC'd. This is particularly annoying when trying to find an email from a specific person in a thread of multiple people.
How can I change this back?

I get that but it doesnt solve the problem. I am searching from an email from John Doe, to myself Joe Smith.
In 10.7 if I searched John Doe and selected "From" it would list all the emails from John Doe with John Does name bolded in the email window.
In 10.8 the emails shown have the recipients name on them, not the sender.

Lion Mail search: 'All' search missing some mailboxes - anyone seen this?

Yet another Mail search issue in Lion - at least I have not seen this one documented before.
Noticed in searching Mail after move from Snow Leopard to Lion: a search on 'All' mailboxes misses items that are present in one particular (very large) mailbox, although a search on that mailbox alone finds them. Because we have two Macs, one already migrated to Lion, the other still with Snow Leopard, we can see that a search in SN finds everything whereas the Lion search does not.
But there's more: a possible explanation occurred to us: the 'missing' mailbox was titled "INBOX" (some levels down - comes from an Entourage archive). Renamed that OLD INBOX, and results started coming up (with 'All' mailboxes selected) including its contents.
However: changing the search string to different senders produced inconsistent results. Use one name, that person's incoming mail in that folder showed up with search set to 'All'. Change to another sender, still no results from that mailbox, even tho' (as ever) the messages showed up when the search was restricted to that mailbox.
All very confusing!
What's going on?
Thanks.

Seems to work here ok:

Apple Mail Search is acting strange

Hello.
I have been having some major issue with Apple Mail (6.5) in its search function.
I have been a heavy user of Apple Mail (over 15,000 emails on the program- and archived every year) for many years, and never had this issue.
When I search for a key word it does not find it! I noticed that this not to work on emails in my In Box or Sent Boxes (Gmail email POP). If I move a specific email to a newly created folder On My Mac and then search, the keyword will be found in the email in that new folder- but never on the orignal Inbox or Sent Box! Also, the search works fine for senders of emails (by name) if I search for them.
The issue is mainly in finding a key word in the content of an email and particurly in the In and Sent boxes!
I tried EVERYTHING I could find online from reindenxing the whole Macintosh HD, deleting Envelope Files... I even deleted Apple Mail and then reinstalled it from Mountain Lion DVD! STILL same issue.
To test things, I exported Mailboxes to another Macbook Air I have (brand new) and then imported these mailboxes into the correct location (Inbox, Sent...etc), and the search there worked fine!
ANY IDEAS, as this is frustrating and I am seriously considering switching to new email client after all these years.
Thanks,

The mail search uses Spotlight to find results, so your problem may be more of a corrupted Spotlight index. To recreate your Spotlight index, go to System Preferences->Spotlight, click the Privacy tab at the top, and add your Boot drive here (usually Macintosh HD). Close and re-open this preference page and then remove the Macintosh HD from the privacy tab.
Within about 30 seconds, you should notice the Spotlight magnifying glass icon in the top menu bar will say it is indexing, and it may take about 15+ minutes to complete. Hopefully that will return your missing search results in the Mail.app.

Mail search not working properly

Just upgraded to ML and the search function in mail just isn't working properly, I didn't think the Lion mail search was great but this one seems 10 times worse. If I search for words contained within a message, the results only show messages from the last couple of months even though I know there's dozens of messages containing the same word from the last couple years.
I tried repairing permissions and rebooting. Still same issue.
If I manually open an old message, and then perform a search, that particualar message will get included in the results, but I can't open thousands of emails just for the search to index them.

You should try rebuilding your Spotlight index, as that's what Mail uses.
Go to Spotlight preferences, and drag your boot drive (probably called "Macintosh HD") into the privacy pane. Say OK to the warning. Then after about 10 seconds, remove it. The whole drive will be re-indexed (this will take a couple hours) and then search should work again.

Mail search not working mavericks

Mail search function is not working in any of my mail accounts...gmail, godaddy hosted domain or icloud.
Tried deleting envelope index files and re-index...still doesn't work. Bummer to have brand new 15" retina mbp all in at $3800 and have these type of issues.

This fix worked for me:
Mail uses Spotlight for search results, so you may want to rebuild the Spotlight index. I tried to just rebuild the mail index first but no success. Rebuilding the entire hard drive did the trick.
Note you can rebuilding Mail's spotlight index by going to the Spotlight system preferences, dragging your hard drive to the privacy pane, waiting 10 seconds, and then removing it. Re-indexing your drive may take an hour or more.

Mail search feature not working

Not a good day today but to top it off, my Mail search feature doesn't seem to be working. In the past I've praised OSX Mail search features and enjoyed the instant results all whilst bashing the inop feature Outlook and Notes try to utilize. I'm afraid to say the OSX Lion Mail search feature is completely non-functional. As I was searching for this issue through the support topics, I noticed this very topic appear then quickly disappear. I couldn't duplicate the search again for anything. Hmm.
Also, what's the dealy with opening a PDF in Mail with Preview and your last 5 PDF's open as well? Uncool. And I want Safari to open with my Home page, not the last page I visited.
At least the Spotlight will still identify the messages I'm wrangling for.
No need to reply... just need to vent a bit.

LaraCroft_NYC wrote:
A lot of things are broken in LION. Not recommended for professionals (only iPad users).
But here's a way to make better use of Mail Search:
In the new Mac LION MAIL app, it's not apparent that you can search for any part of any email address the way you could before with any previous OS, for when you type partial email text in the MAIL search field, it simply gives you a drop-down list of wrong or limited suggestions and none of the suggestions are email addresses, but people's names. I don't want to search by name, I want to search by email address. (Maybe I'm the only one who does this.) If two different email addresses have the same associated name (which I have), it chooses the wrong one and searches for the wrong email address!
But there is a way:
1) Select the mailbox you want to search (if any).
2) Type in the search field:
          to: any_string ["return" or "enter"]
          OR
          from: any_string ["return" or "enter"]
3) Your entry will change from this:
to this:
4) Notice that after you press "return" or "enter", your "to:" (or "from:") becomes a pull-down-menu button and the MAIL's silly choices go away. If you click the button, you get this:
and you can change your choice.
3) Strangely, "to:" or "from:" MUST be ALL lowercase for this change to take place. (It will still work if "To:" and "FroM:" are all or part uppercase, but the change to a menu button will not occur.)
4) On the menu bar below the toolbar, you will see the places to search ("All…Selected mailbox…Inbox…Drafts…Sent…Flagged")
Hello Lara_Croft.
Again, this time with your original fix. This works for me.. big help until Apple gets this squared away.
Alan Roseman

Apple Mail search misses many items

Regarding searching within Apple Mail
I will search on emails from, say, "Fred Smith" and get a bunch of results that won't include an email that I know that I just got from Fred Smith. Nowhere to be seen. Then I'll scroll down through my messages and find the message... exactly from Fred Smith. But not showing up in Apple Mail search.
Or, and I see this one a lot lately: I'll search "Entire Message" for "Fred Smith" and get a bunch of results that don't include the email that I know is there. Then I'll switch to "From" suddenly the missing message appears.
For me, for years now, Apple Mail is HORRIBLY unreliable in its searching. I still use it, because I like other parts of it, but I don't ever expect the search to actually turn up items that are there...
Anyone know why / what's going on, or how I might fix this, or whether there's a new version of Mail coming with 10.5 that might fix this?

That a message was sent by Fred Smith doesn’t necessarily mean that “Fred Smith” appears anywhere in the message, not even if Mail shows his name in the From column or message header when displaying that message. If you do View > Message > Raw Source on one of the messages that aren’t included in the search results, do you actually see “Fred Smith” anywhere?
and I see this one a lot lately: I'll search "Entire Message" for "Fred Smith"
and get a bunch of results that don't include the email that I know is there.
Then I'll switch to "From" suddenly the missing message appears.
Mail uses Spotlight for Entire Message searches only, and its own index for the rest. What you’re describing here would indicate there is something wrong with Spotlight’s indexing of your mail rather than with Mail itself...
Verify/repair the startup disk (not just permissions), as described here:
The Repair functions of Disk Utility: what's it all about?
After having fixed all the filesystem issues, if any, open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, type the following command and press <Return> (you can copy the command here and paste it in Terminal):
sudo mdutil -E -i on /
The -E option tells Spotlight to delete any already existing index data (so that it’s rebuilt from scratch all over again). The -i on option ensures that indexing is enabled. Finally, the ‘/’ at the end means “apply this command to the startup disk”.
After entering the previous command in Terminal, you’ll be prompted for your administrator password. Type it blindly (you won’t see any feedback of the keystrokes while you type it) and press <Return>.
Alternatively, you may prefer to reindex the startup disk using the following procedure, but I’ve seen cases where using Teminal worked whereas doing what the article suggests didn’t:
Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes
While you’re on it, make sure Mail Messages is checked in the Search Results pane of System Preferences > Spotlight and that no folders containing mail data appear in the Privacy pane.
For best results, quit Mail and don’t play too much with your disk while Spotlight reindexes it, i.e. avoid files being created/modified/deleted, mail being downloaded, etc.

IOS7 mail search results appear to be random by date also where are the search parameters, from to etc..? help!

Mail search returns results by random date. Where are the mail search parameters, from,to,etc?

This is really annoying. Mail search on iOS 7 never worked, either on iPhone
4S or on iPad.
Search results are not sorted in any perceivable order. I get totally random results, with messages dating 4 years back jumping to yesterday and so on.
I have never seen Apple to respond to this issue with earnest feedback, and users are often dismissed.
I used to have to resort to my Macbook Pro to get decent results, but due to the many mail app problems on OSX, I do not rely on it anymore.
Can Apple please give feedback to this search issue on the IOS devices? It is really, REALLY crippling.

Transport Mail Database issues crashing Transport service

We are experiencing frequent issues on Hub servers (as often as once a week) where Transport Mail DB issues crash the Transport service. Had an MS specialist in the other day who could not exactly figure out the root cause. The pattern usually is as follows:
1. Event ID 486 - This event refers to a failure to move a log file (associated with Transport Mail DB queues) because it is being used by another process. What that process could be is unknown.
2. Event ID 413 - Unable to create a new logfile because the database cannot write to the log drive.
3. Event ID 492 - The logfile sequence in <dir> has been halted
4. Event ID 17019 - A database operation has encountered a I/O error. The Microsoft Exchange Transport service is shutting down. Exception details: Microsoft.Exchange.Isam.IsamLogWriteFailException: Failure writing to log file (-510)
Also followed by events 7001,1022,1002, and 1003.
Haven't been able to determine what is causing Event ID 486. Not aware of any process that would be tying up the access to the log file. These queue files are stored on a local disk, not a SAN.
Any ideas as to what could be causing this? Running E2K7SP1 Rollup 2 currently on all Exchange systems.

Hi,
I suggest that you use the following method to check which process access the log file indicated in the event 486:
Using Process Explorer
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx
Then, we did the following:
1. Launch Process Explorer
2. Click Find, Find Handle or DLL
3. Enter the log name indicated in the event 486 and click Search
In addition, please also check whether any events such as 150004 occur before the Transport service crashes. If you notice the event, I also suggest that you refer to the following article:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201658(EXCHG.80).aspx
Mike

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Flg were attempted with futile results:
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I have always been able to search Mail.app (v 3.2) messages by using the (top right) Search box. But if I type any search string in that box now, no messages are found. But Spotlight searches are still finding hits.
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You can rebuild your mail search indexes by following these instructions:
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Cheers,
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after installing the Maverick upgrade my Apple Mail search and flags no longer work correctly? I've already rebuilt the mailboxes with no change in the problem. What else can I do???

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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6030
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