Mail search problem

Prior to upgrading to Yosemite, mail search results allowed me to find where a specific email was stored in my folders.
When I would click on the folder into in the upper right hand corner the specific folder location would be highlighted.
In the example below you can see my search criteria and the resultant message with the specific info about which folder contains the message, in this example "FLASHLIGHT & BATTERIES". Since I upgraded to Yosemite I can no longer find the folder for a specific email by clicking on folder name.
Any ideas? Thanks

I have this exact same problem. After upgrading to to the new OS X I can no longer search my email. Not by email address or name or keyword. Nothing.
VIPs while still tagged as VIPs no longer show up in the VIP section either. Says I have NO VIP mail despite having 4 unread in my mailbox.
Spotlight doesn't worth either so I wonder if they are connected? My computer will index if I restart it. But if it goes to sleep it wipes the indexing and I can no longer search my email or spotlight again.

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Mail search problems after installing Lion

After installing Lion search in mail app dosent work correctly anymore. I keep thousands of emails in my mailbox and usually search needed email by typing sender to search, now it find only few sender. Any help anyone?

I ran into the same problem with only some messages (if any at all) showing up in the searches in Mail. For an example, I have over 100 messages from Netflix within all my mail folders (trash included) but when I search for anything containing "netflix" it would only pull up 2 messages from my trash folder on two random dates. This was the case for ANY searches I was trying to pull up, not just for netflix emails.
I spoke to an iOS Senior Advisor who did a screen share with me (because he had never heard of the problem previously) and after reviewing the issue, he said he will be taking this up to the engineers.
Here is what fixed the problem for me:
1. Enable Indexing
Open Terminal, and type the following: sudo mdutil -i on /
If it asks for your password, type it in and hit return.
Re-open mail. If this didn't fix anything, then you will need to re-index:
2. Re-indexing HD
Go to System Preferences, Spotlight, click on the Privacy tab, click on the + to add the entire Macintosh HD to the list of "Prevent spotlight from searching these locations" and then remove the Macintosh HD by clicking the - button.
Once you've done this is will automatically start re-indexing in spotlight. This took about 90 minutes on my computer, but once it was done, I re-opened mail and it was working properly again.
If you still run into issues, I've heard that in Mail, clicking on "Mailbox" then "Rebuild" can sometimes fix the issue. Let me know if any of those steps worked for you!

Mail search problem ios7

Upgraded to ios7 but can't search my mail like I used to. Many emails that should come up on the search don't show up and the ones that do are all over the place in terms of dates.

I appreciate your reply, James. But I assure you, what you've experienced is not at all the case with my Yahoo Mail account set up under the Apple ios7 email client update. Not only does everything appear not even close to chronologically in a search, but emails that are clearly there when going to a Windows computer do not appear on the search and also disappear from the inBox list completely!
Regarding pulling down on the search results list, I've tried that many times. a couple of times, the "All Mailboxes/Current Mailboxes" box appears, but most of the time it doesn't. Which leads me to believe that there's something preventing it from coming out of being hidden.
I'm still waiting for Apple to weigh in on this, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon.

Mail search fix?

Has anyone got a definite fix for the Mail search problem - it's driving me crazy. Search won't find all emails using the To and From fields in all mailboxes. I'm running latest Mavericks.

Quit Mail. Force quit if necessary.
Back up all data before proceeding.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. In the Finder, select
          Go ▹ Go to Folder
from the menu bar. Paste into the box that opens by pressing command-V, then press return.
A folder window will open. Inside it there should be files with names as follows:
          Envelope Index
          ExternalUpdates.storedata
Move those files to the Desktop, leaving the window open. Other files in the folder may have longer names that begin as above. Move those files, if any, to the Trash.
Relaunch Mail. It should prompt you to re-import your messages. You may get a warning that the index is damaged and that Mail has to quit. Click OK. Typically, the process takes a few minutes, but it may take hours if you have gigantic mailboxes. In that case, you may be able to speed things up by temporarily adding your home folder to the Privacy list in the Spotlight preference pane. Remove it when Mail has finished importing.
Test. If Mail now works as expected, you can delete the files you moved to the Desktop. Otherwise, post your results.

How I solved my Spotlight+ Mail indexing problem

OK, so I thought I would post my solution to a stubborn indexing problem, for people who may have the same issue (and it does seem many people do).
Problem: Spotlight index was unreliable. In particular, Spotlight was terrible at indexing mail. It could not find the messages by content that it would find by searching the "from" field, nor could it find those reliably. Unusable.
What DID NOT work:
-- adding and removing any folder whatsoever in the Privacy preferences of Spotlight. The index would rebuild, but with the same problems.
-- doing this via terminal (e.g, using sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/MyHardDisk)
-- using Onyx
-- using Spotless
-- simply reinstalling the system
-- manually modifying the plist files inside the .spotlight folder to add and remove the folders that would not get indexed.
What DID work:
-- first, I reinstalled the system. That's not such a big deal. Upgrade up to 10.4.6
-- then, I authorized the root user (that's probably not necessary) (this, you do by using Netinfo manager)
-- Then, I deactivated the index (via terminal:
sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/MyHardDisk
-- now the tricky part. This concerns Mail, in particular.
I have a very complex mail folder (tens of thousands of messages). I noticed that inside each mail folder, I had two things that were not supposed to be there
1. a copy of each folder.mbox which was empty, but with the same name without the extension .mbox. This is probably something that was created while importing mail from Panther to Tiger, for what I can tell.
2. Most importantly, a file named ".index.ready". This also, apparently, was an old legacy coming from Panther. I suspect this was the main problem for the lack of indexing in Mail.
Ok, so... I deleted these folders and files. If you have a complex structure of subfolders, you can delete the files with an Unix command by first cd to your mail folder, and then use
find . -name \.index.r* -ok rm {} \;
which will ask you confirmation before deleting each file.
It was faster to remove the empty subfolders by hand, as they all had different names.
-- Ok, at this point, I erased entirely the .Spotlight-V100 directory which stays at the root of your computer. You can do it with a rmdir command from the terminal or, as I did, you can login as root (remember, we activated root), use a utility that allows you to see hidden files (e.g., Tinkertool), and move it manually to the trash folder.
Then I emptied the trash. For superstition, I restarted, and let the index be built again (that took about 5 hours in my computer, for an HD with about 60 gb occupied on it).
Now everything seems to work perfectly fine. I don't know whether this procedure can be shortened, but I do know that nothing else worked for me. I thought I would post it here as I spent sooo much time to solve this problem, and furthermore, I found that none of the suggested solutions would work.
OK, your responsibility to do it, if you want to do it. Hope nobody needs to!
Best to you all,
l.
Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lucabo! Using ideas from your post, I also (at least for now) solved my Mail indexing problem. One day (not even after an upgrade) Mail just quit finding messages by content, even when I had open a message with that content!
What I did:
-- In System Preferences, told Spotlight to index only Mail (I just use grep from a Terminal window for everything else!)
-- Ensured Mail app wasn't running
-- Backed up my Library/Mail folder to an external disk
-- Turned off indexing via Terminal (after sudo sh), with
mdutil -i off /Volumes/MyHardDisk
-- Deleted old files in my mailboxes (inside the whatever.mbox folders):
.index.ready
mbox
tableofcontents
content_index
It was clear that mbox, tableofcontents, and content_index were left over from a previous version of mail - they hadn't been accessed since I upgraded.
Note that I didn't delete the whatever.mbox folders (just the plain mbox file inside)!
-- Deleted (in Terminal) the .Spotlight-V100 in the root directory
-- Restarted my Mac. The indexing started itself. Since I had it set up to index only Mail, it took about 3-ish hours to finish (I have 100s of 1000s of emails in thousands of folders).
After the indexing finished, all the test searches that I tried worked. From now on I will always be suspicious if search doesn't find anything!
Also, I just checked - using the Spotlight field on the menu bar now works better too. When the Mail search problem showed up, I tried using the Spotlight field and the Spotlight window, but they would just flash up a few items, remove the list, over and over, sometimes with the beachball, then finally settle to an empty list. Now the Spotlight field seems to work.
I infer that the Spotlight index gets corrupted, and that the Spotlight code doesn't notice that it's reading junk from the index...
BTW, about the same time that search quit working, some emails in my Inboxes got highlighted with a dark brown background color. Have no idea why. They aren't marked as Junk (the junk messages have the text in the usual lighter brown). But, when I select a message with the dark brown highlight, mark it as junk, then mark it as not junk, the dark brown highlight goes away. On some occasions, just quitting Mail and restarting makes the dark brown highlights go away - but not always. Sigh... at least it's not a show stopper, even if it is ugly!
Thanks again, Lucabo, for your post!
Mac OS X (10.4.6)

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.

Spotlight & Mail Search Not Working After Deleting email Account's '.OfflineCache' File. How Do I Get Back to Normal?

Running OSX 10.7.4 and Mail.5.2.
One of 3 email accounts was constantly trying, but unable to synch. The rotating splines were turning non-stop but not synching (other two email accounts worked just fine.) After doing some searching on the internet, I found several articles about this. Many included the symptom of the "Recovered Messages" constantly being recovered/generated. I had noticed that I would get some recovered messages on occaision, but had never noticed it to be problematic. These articles suggested that the ".OfflineCache" file for that email account had been corrupted or the root of my problem. So, I deleted the .OfflineCach file as per this article...
Fix OSX Mail Creating Multiple 'Recovered Message
Well that got my mail working again. However, I soon noticed that spotlight no longer works and when I try to search mail, it doesn't work. It will only return a complete email address/contact; it doesn't search the contents of the email.
I tried to get spotlight to re-index the hard drive. However, when I try to drag a folder or volume to it, I get the error:
Since spotlight and mail search have always worked flawlessly for 5 years, I'm confident this is related to having deleted " .OffflineCache" for that particular email account. However, it seems strange that mail search won't work for the other email accounts.
Any other tips for getting spotlight back online?
How about the .OfflineCache file. Will Mail restore it, replace it on it's own?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Also, looking back, not long before this problem started, I was trying to send a single email with numerous pictures ( around 50 or so.) I forgot to select "medium" for the picture size and it started trying to upload them at full size. I realized this after a minute or two and cancelled the upload, changed to 'medium' and sent the email with no problem. I point this out because the "Multiple Recovered Messages" error seems to be related to or being induced by having an excessively large file in the particular mail account's .Offline.Cache file.

Well, a couple days later and it seems that the .offlinecache has been rebuilt. Finder, Spotlight, & Mail search all seem to be working normally now!

Mail search not working + Spotlight keeps indexing

I have an old problem that has resurfaced after creating a new user on my Mac. Mail search brings no results and Spotlight is constantly indexing - day in, day out. It never seems to get there. I tried turning my hard drive to private in Spotlight settings and then taking it out. Previously Spotlight seemed to get bogged down with external drives now it's stuck indexing my Mac.
Any advice? Is there a way I get unstick this?

I can't believe that Apple have STILL not sorted this out. I haven't created a new user (so it's nothing to do with that), but Mail.app won't find anything when searching "Entire Message" in the current Mailbox or in "All Mailboxes". This has been ongoing since Leopard was first released, and we are now up to 10.5.8 without this being fixed.
Here are some of the reports:
Topic : Spotlight does not search Mail messages
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1366101
Topic : Search "Entire Message" returns "0 Found" in mailboxes
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1341832
Topic : Spotlight died on me
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1226645
Topic : I can't search through my inbox!
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1387827
Topic : Leopard's Spotlight doesn't search Mail messages
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1219030
Topic : Mail Search
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1347387
Topic : Mail Won't Search
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1204827
Topic : Search does not work
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1254966
Topic : Mail search not working
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1289253
Topic : Unable to Search Mailbox
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1232504
Topic : Why is Search in Mail.app busted?
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1403758
Topic : Mail Search comes up empty
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1378473
Topic : Search "Entire Message" not working with Smart Mailboxes?
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6548355&#6548355
Topic : Mail searches yield no results! Smart mailboxes also yield no results!
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1395508
Topic : 10.5.2 Mail.app search still not working (Entire Message)
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1389466

Mail search not working after clean install of 10.5.4 on new 20" iMac

Apple Mail search is not working. Search on "subject line" works, but search on "entire message" does not. For example, searching with "parking" yields NO results, and there are many messages with the word "parking" in their body in the mailboxes. It happens with both "In Box" and "All Mailboxes" checked.
What's going on?
I did a clean install of Mac OS X on a 20" iMac using the Install disk shipped with the machine. Then I ran Software Update. Still, the problem happens, on a clean baseline system.
Argh.

I've had this problem since Tiger. Various solutions have been posted, but none have worked for me. It really cripples Mail--I've used emails as my personal database for years, kind of a history log, 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, search "entire message" never finds anything at all. Searching for subjects etc works fine.

Mail search not working, at all

Mail search is not working AT ALL for me. 0 results for things that should have hundreds of results. Have tried most of the suggestions here already - repaired permissions, deleted envelope index files, rebuilt mailboxes, etc.
Just broken. Also, these "support communities" seem to be a downgrade from the old discussion boards IMO. Harder, not easier, to find info.

I am having the same problem, I can search last names and sometimes get a couple of results to show up, though for the most part I get nothing, even when I know the word is in the subject line and email address.

Paypal email message content not found in Mail search

I've looked on the net and can't find any one else reporting this problem so it has to be something at my end.
My Mail search cannot find any word found in the message body of an email from Paypal.
I just upgraded to Yosemite so thought it was a problem with the new OS as I've been able to search message content in OS 10.8 (and previous) for years.
However...
I just re-started using a cloned HD with my old 10.8 OS on it and the search isn't working now.
It finds everything else asked but nothing in a Paypal email.
This includes messages in my inbox and messages stored in various "On My Mac" folders.
I seem to remember this happened before, maybe 2004/2005?? Which ever OS version I was using then?
It couldn't be worked out so I moved over to Microsoft Entourage.
I don't want to switch email software again but the lack of ability to search is causing me some problems.
I did open an Apple support case on this and they couldn't give me an answer but said it had been reported already and may be looked at for a fix in forthcoming OS revisions.
Funny how no one's asked this on any community pages.
Any ideas?? Am I missing something. I don't understand how it's worked on my older OS for years and now suddenly it's stopped.
Does search need anything to find words in content that I may have inadvertently changed?

I have now gone back to my OS 10.8 disc and re-built the folder with my paypal emails in and it is now searching ok so forget what i said earlier.
I'd edit the original post but it won't let me???

Mac Mail Search

I am having a problem with Mac Mail Search - In the mail search box I am not given the search options To, From, Entire Message etc - I am on a recently purchased macbook that has OS 10.6.4 and mac mail 4.3 -

This forum is for Apple's old productivity program 'AppleWorks': please post your question in the Snow Leopard Forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=263
Where I'm sure people will be eager to help you.

Mail search isn't working. Help!

Mail search isn't working (I'm running 10.5.8). It will search Subject/From/To, but searching 'Entire message' brings no results. This is a disaster. Tried reindexing Spotlight, but that didn't work. Any ideas gratefully received!

It does sound like a Spotlight indexing problem, has it had time to finish indexing?
In the meantime, it won't be as fast searching for content, but I'd get EasyFind...
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11076
Here's a direct download link to EasyFind 4.0 which runs in 10.3.9 & up...
http://www.devon-technologies.com/files/legacy/macosx1039/EasyFind.dmg.zip
From this page,
http://www.devon-technologies.com/support/faqs.php?p=default&cat=19
Freeware applications:
    * EasyFind 4.0
    * PhotoStickies 5.6
    * ThumbsUp 4.3
    * XMenu 1.8
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/8707
Use it to search your Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail for case insensitive whatever... once you open that folder in the Finder it should be a choice to limit the search to that folder at the dropdown at the right of EasyFind.

Mail search not finding existing items

The simple Mail Search tool finds many things in the mailboxes, but misses more and more. When a search is being done within a given mailbox or folder, the search expands (sometimes unreliably) to go through all mailboxes/folders, when this was not desired.
Is the indexing not working? How can this be checked?
What are limits of indexing (number of messages, etc.)?
Mail is open for many hours/day, so time should be available.
Entire Mail Folder is now over 1.3 GB, too big to handle?

I had the same problem but rebuilding spotlight's index fixed the problem. I followed the instructions at
http://www.macobserver.com/tip/2006/07/21.1.shtml
Or Onyx can be used...

Apple Mail Search and Spotlight do not work for locating email messages after upgrading to Lion 10.8.3.

Apple Mail Search and Spotlight do not work for locating email messages after upgrading to Lion 10.8.3 on my 27" iMac.
When searching in Apple Mail, sometimes a get a few results (with many missing), and sometimes no results at all.
I had absolutely no problems before with Snow Loepard.
I have reindexed mail and my startup drive. I have followed discussions regarding this matter and tried everything - a waste of time.
This is VERY serious for me - I have many thousands of messages that I archive and need to reference for work and clients, and now I cannot find them.

I found out that I needed a $100 mini displayport to dual-link dvi adapter to make my $30" cinema display work with my macbook pro
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB571Z/A/mini-displayport-to-dual-link-dvi-ada pter?fnode=51
When I found out that solved the problem, I took it back because that was too expensive for a stupid adapter, and it still didn't work perfectly.

Mail search problem

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