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.

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