Mail Search question

Is there a way to search my mail messages for a specific word or phrase?
Thanks!

See this reference:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/16/#mail
http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_use_search_tokens_lion_mail
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/os_x_lion_using_mails_new_search_features /

Similar Messages

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.

Mac mail search function is not working. Any search term returns all records.

Mac mail search function is not working. Any search term returns all records.

hi eric. many thanks.
i will have to read these links closer but what i meant to say is that the hard drive space that was being taken up seemed like it suddenly jumped way up because i had just gotten through a process in the last month where i am storing all my My Documents data on my Mac Pro. i am doing this in order to decide whether i should just keep it ALL on my Mac Pro and use ChronoSync to sync /some/ of it to my MBP.
so if i look in the Documents folder on my Mac Pro i have a ton of folders that i have created with a ton of data. if i look in the Documents folder on my MBP there are NO folders that have data in them that i created. there are other folders such as folders that various software created but what i mean to point out is that there was a LOT of available space on my HD until recently.
i am wondering if there is some way that running the Mail re-index (it then ran some kind of "Importing" routine) or by syncing my Photostream to the MBP caused a huge jump in data on this drive. if it is the photostream sync i can just take this off or see if it will sync more selectively. if it is something to do with mac mail jumping in size i am not sure why this would happen or what to do about it.
does that question make sense?
i mean, before i did these two operations my recollection is that i would have had 130 GB on the hard drive (really just guessing here) and now there is like 218 GB on the hard drive and i don't know where all this came from...

Spotlight and Mail searches

I have just replaced my 2007 MP with a shiny new one, (garbage can someone described it to me) !
The computer is responding a bit slowly entering text into Safari fields, i.e. logging into sites, username & passwords - I type out a word and it takes seconds to appear in the box.
Also searches in Mail & Spotlight do not yield any results and judging by other posts on the subject, is probably down to Spotlight indexing the 3TB of data on the Pegasus drive.
I did not migrate any files over from my old MP as I wanted to keep a clean new drive.(I did this initially but ended up in a mess so had to erase the disk and reinstall Yosemite) I have reinstalled the majority of my apps that were on the old machine from the app store and note a significant difference in the sizes of the Libraries :
                    Old MP          New MP
Library          88gb                 6 gb
User library   33gb               11 gb
So some questions arising that hopefully someone will answer :-
Doing a spotlight search of the Pegasus drive - there is no progress bar (as noted in other posts) - there is a message that just says "Searching Promise". So presumably it is indexing the drive. Not sure how long it will take to do 3TB of data (a lot of video)
Mail - doing a search in Mail does not do anything, no dropdown etc. I presume that this is using Spotlight and once that is indexed then a Mail search should work?
Is there a way to migrate specific apps from my old MP?
I am wondering why such a big difference between the libraries on the 2 machines.
Thanks & regards

The warranty entitles you to complimentary phone support for the first 90 days of ownership.

Why did the Mail Search drop to my email section?

The Mail Search section dropped from below the url to middle of the Subject Line in my email.

Firefox doesn't do email, it's strictly a web browser.
If you are using Firefox to access your mail, you are using "web-mail". You need to seek support from your service provider or a forum for that service.
If your problem is with Mozilla Thunderbird, please '''Tag''' this thread as being for Thunderbird in the right-hand column of this page. This question currently is in the Firefox queue for answers.

Spotlight and mail searches not working, but...

I contacted Apple Support by phone and they had me go through all of the procedures to re-index the meta data and so on on my iMac and still my Spotlight and Mail searches are not working properly. (I cannot find certain files even though I know they exist...more often than not!) Supposedly, when I "forced" a re-index operation by going to Spotlight Preferences and changing Privacy settings for the entire hard disk and then changing them back, the Spotlight icon on the top right of the menubar was supposed to indicate that re-indexing was taking place, but that never happened. It seems that I possibly have a corrupt metadata file which just won't re-index, or some kind of permission changed which doesn't allow re-indexing to happen, or SOMETHING like that.
Is there a singular hidden "index" or metadata file on the Mac under Lion where this information is stored, can I get at it so I can trash it, and if I do, will the computer automatically rebuild a new index file (if such a singular file even exists)?
I asked this question at a semi-local Apple Store Genius Bar as well, and they were scratching their heads. I have not yet brought the machine in to the store --- if I can avoid that lengthy step, I'd much prefer to fix this here in my office. (The machine works fine otherwise, and I need it here all the time, it's just that searching doesn't work)
I have also tried a re-install over the existing OS (leaving all my apps and documents in place), but have not tried a complete erase-and-install installation. I have a complete Time Machine backup of the entire drive, but the question remains...if I use Apple Migration Assistant to bring the apps and documents back in from Time Machine after doing a "clean" install on a wiped-clean hard drive, won't Time Machine also restore the old metadata that I suspect is corrupt? If so, how would I go about restoring all of my apps and documents without the use of the Migration Assistant or the Time Machine backup file (which may contain a corrupt index file)? If I do a hard drive clone with one of the available utilities dedicated to that purpose, how do I restore JUST the things I need (including serial numbers, etc) without risk of bringing over "bad" index files?
By the way, this machine was running Snow Leopard for well over a year before I upgraded to Lion, with no searching problems whatsoever.
Thanks for any help that anyone might be able to provide. I know I ask a lot of questions, but I don't want to go through the lengthy cloning of my hard drive and then doing a "clean" install and then be saddled with the same problem again.

Hi Linc,
I was able to get some text to appear by choosing "All Messages" from the Error Log list. Here's what I got when i filtered "mdworker" (I have indicated where I removed repetitions):
3/14/12 9:24:10.617 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
failed to parse embedded CMap.
3/14/12 9:24:10.617 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
syntax error, unexpected DICTSTART.
[about a dozen instances of the above two lines were removed]
3/14/12 9:24:10.622 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
*** process 2211 exceeded 500 log message per second limit - remaining messages this second discarded ***
3/14/12 9:24:26.203 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
Range {0x0000, 0xFFFF} is not 1-dimensional; handling as a special case.
[Five instances of the above line were removed]
3/14/12 9:24:55.603 PM
mdworker
Unexpected EOF, returning last token as fallback
3/20/12 3:54:30.197 PM
mdworker32
kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
3/20/12 3:54:30.735 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
Range {0x0000, 0xFFFF} is not 1-dimensional; handling as a special case.
3/20/12 3:54:30.736 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
Range {0x0000, 0xFFFF} is not 1-dimensional; handling as a special case.
3/20/12 3:54:30.736 PM
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
Range {0x0000, 0xFFFF} is not 1-dimensional; handling as a special case.
And here is what I got when I filtered using "mds" (since these are all at different times, I didn't remove duplicates):
3/14/12 9:35:35.672 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/14/12 10:45:54.051 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/14/12 11:45:55.907 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 12:45:53.271 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 1:45:52.702 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 2:45:52.837 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 3:45:52.046 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 4:45:51.586 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 5:45:51.996 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 6:45:52.049 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 7:45:51.647 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 8:46:05.149 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 1:27:56.526 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 2:25:20.942 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 3:26:14.623 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 4:26:06.091 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 5:26:29.923 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 9:48:38.902 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/15/12 10:15:02.995 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/16/12 7:55:44.632 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/16/12 8:07:28.002 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/16/12 4:28:06.236 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/16/12 4:31:05.891 PM
mds
(Error) LSOF: File '/Volumes/CAROLLE' (fd=15) left open on device 234881032
3/19/12 5:19:52.696 PM
mds
(Normal) FMW: FMW 0 0
3/19/12 5:19:52.704 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Root store set to FSOnly with matching create! (loaded:1)
3/19/12 5:19:59.291 PM
mds
(Warning) Server: No stores registered for metascope "kMDQueryScopeComputerIndexed"
3/19/12 5:20:31.340 PM
imagent
[Warning] Creating empty account: Default for service: IMDService (SubNet)
3/19/12 6:29:40.573 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/19/12 9:15:43.527 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/19/12 9:17:32.723 PM
mds
(Error) LSOF: File '/Volumes/CHUBER' (fd=22) left open on device 234881032
3/19/12 9:39:28.149 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/19/12 10:43:40.855 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 7:22:42.424 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 9:46:04.479 AM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 3:54:42.852 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 4:23:54.016 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 5:23:56.550 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
3/20/12 9:18:16.565 PM
mds
(Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
I hope some of this information is useful in solving my problem. Thanks in advance for your help!

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.

Archive folder missing from Mail & search not working

I've been having trouble getting the Archive mailbox to appear in Mail. What's worse, often the search function is broken, and Mail doesn't turn up any search results. I've found some ways to get the Archive folder to reappear, but these only seem to help temporarily. For instance, clicking on the gear at the bottom left and selecting "Get Account Info" then selecting the Archive folder causes it to reappear, but this is only temporary and it disappears after another restart or sometimes after an hour or two. The search not working is the worst, as it sometimes is working and sometimes isn't. I don't have any idea what's causing this, but I am at my wit's end because I NEED Mail to be firing on all cylinders.

Hello, and welcome to the Discussions.
What are your selections in Mail Preferences/Accounts/Advanced for this Gmail account, if using IMAP, regarding keeping message for Offline use? The Mail search can only access the list of messages to search Subject, From, etc, but not the entire message unless copies of all messages are being kept on the computer. This would be true for any IMAP account, btw.
More info, please.
Ernie

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

I've tried several times to perform a search for the word "marin" in my emails... I know that a guy emailed me a week or so ago and said he was in Marin county, so I know that it's there...but for some reason when I search for it within Mail, no results come up.
I decided to try this with a bunch of different words... none of them work. The only way I'm able to search for content within my messages is to search by name in the "To" or "From" sections of the search menu...
Any suggestions?

make sure your Mail folder is indexed by spotlight. go to system preferences->spotlight->privacy pane. what do you have there? if Mail folder is not excluded try reindexing your home directory. add your home folder to the privacy pane for about 5 seconds and remove it from there. it should be reindexed. if that does not help reindex the whole hard drive in the same way. try mail search then.

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 + 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 no longer looks past last 30 days or so

Using the search function in the same manner as ever, the results no longer go back further than early July (today is the 31th).
This also affects the Smart Mailboxes, which sort out client mail, etc.
Restarting does nothing. Mailbox rebuild option is grayed out.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Eric D.

Eric,
I do not experience this, and Mail Search is working normally.
What type of account are you using -- POP, IMAP or .mac?
If you have two or more accounts, then Rebuild will not be available until you click on the black triangle beside each standard Icon section to reveal, for example, the Inbox for each separate account.
More info, please.
Ernie

Topic area: Apple Mail. Question: How do I get the message preview window to display to the right of my list of email messages?

Topic area: Apple Mail. Question: How do I get the message preview window to display to the right of my list of email messages? i.e. to preview whatever message is currently highlighted in the center window list of messages?

At present there is no preference option available to move the preview
pane to right side of the mail window.
Best.

Mail Search question

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