No "Entire Message"-results, though Spotlight does work

Hello everybody,
I encounter problems with the search-function of mail.app, because searching the entire messages results in a blank page. I searched through these discussion-groups before and finally got Spotlight to finding my messages again, using the re-indexing-function. But Mail does not to take notice of that. Again, no results! Searching for title, recipient etc works like a charm.
Seems like Mail and Spotlight are not working together anymore.
Please help me as it is really awkward not to be able to search within Mail, but having to take the detour with spotlight.
Hauke

I even disabled all plugins (though I did not install any)
and then enabled them again
What do you mean?
Is there maybe a program that should run and that doesn't on my mac?
Actually, what I was looking for is the opposite, i.e. some piece of software you could have installed that could be interfering with Mail.
BTW, the actual list of processes running on your system is larger than you posted. You can see the full list choosing All Processes instead of My Processes in Activity Monitor (don’t post it).
Try this to determine the scope of the problem:
1. Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts, and create a new user account for testing purposes.
2. Either log out of your main user account or just quit Mail so that it does not interfere with the other user account.
3. Log in as the newly created user and set up Mail anew there.
4. If this is a POP account, go to Mail > Preferences > Accounts > Advanced and disable Remove copy from server after retrieving a message if it’s enabled.
5. Check whether the problem also happens when logged in as another user.
If the problem is system-wide, another thing to try would be reinstalling the Combo Update for the type of computer and the version of Mac OS X you’re using, unless this is the version of Mac OS X that came with your computer:
About the Mac OS X 10.4.8 Combo Update
Mac OS X 10.4.8 Combo Update for PPC
Mac OS X 10.4.8 Combo Update for Intel
Take a look at the following articles for guidelines on how to properly install system updates:
Troubleshooting installation and software updates
Installing software updates
Basically, you should verify/repair the startup disk before installing the update, no applications should be running while installing it, and you may experience unexpected results if you have third-party system software modifications (not normal applications) installed.

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HT201285 Why can i not see the entire Message in my spotlight search? when i click on it

I am about to SCREAM!!! How do you read the entire search result in spolight? Please someone help me!! I am not good with this phone. Would it make a difference if the message had been deletedfrom the conversation? HELP

It's not clear just what you're asking.
If you search for, say, "Smith" on the iPhone's Spotlight-like search feature (which you get to on the iPhone by swiping left-to-right from the home screen), you will see, among other things, those text messages that are sent by "Smith". You can then click on one of the messages shown. Doing this will reveal the entire message.

Since upgrading to Mavericks the "search" function in mailbox does not show any results, however spotlight is working fine.

The search function on my mailbox is not responding after trying to search my mailbox. I am able to search my mailboxes through Spotlight though. This seems to be since upgrading to mavericks.
I was wandering if anyone has this problem and knows how I can resolve it.
Thank you

Hmmm,
Open Console in Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.

Search 'Entire Message' in Mail on network account.

Hello -
Recently an issue has come up where my users are unable to choose the "Entire Message" option when performing a search in Mail. "From", "To" and "Subject" all work fine.
All of my users are running latest updates of 10.6 and 10.7 and all are on network accounts. This is not a new problem, but it's a new question that came up a few months ago and I've been scraping for an answer since then.
-I understand that for the "From, To and Subject" search options, Mail handles them separately in the Envelope Index file.
-Spotlight is responsible for the Entire Message option.
-I had to force spot light to index the user folder through terminal using mdutil and specifying "~/". The user folders are not on local storage so Spotlight ignores them.
After forcing mdutil to index - a spotlight search will return results as I would expect - searching entire message but, Mail still does not allow for the Entire Message search option.
Please let me know if more information would help. Thank you in advance.

Maybe I just needed to talk it out, but I think I've sorted it out on my own.
I went to the Account Prefs > Offending Mailbox and under the heading:
"Keep copies of messages offline for viewing" from "Dont Keep Any..." to "All..."
Then I went to Mailbox>Rebuild in the menubar and Bang!
Results!
Now I'm just waiting for the rebuild to finish to see what kind of hit my HD is going to take.

Strange 'Entire Message' search problems on cloned external drive only

Hello,
I'm having some strange problems with the 'Entire Message' spotlight style search function in Mail.
There are various threads on the forums about a similar problem, as can be found here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9450686#9450686
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=7286254
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=7540966
However, here's the twist – it works perfectly fine on my computer, a late 2006 MBP with Tiger, but the 'Entire Message' search ONLY doesn't work when booting from the external hard drive, which is an EXACT clone using smart copy with super duper. Everything else works fine!
To give an example, when I type in a client's second name in Mail on my computer's HD, with 'Entire Message' enabled 400+ emails appear, when I type it in when booting from the external HD clone there was around 10 emails on the first attempt (whilst Mail was open at the same time) and there were 0 on my second clone attempt, whilst Mail and all other applications were closed. Enabling 'From' and 'To' works fine, just not the 'Entire Message' search.
I really need this critical function to work, as I'm about to loose my old computer and use it on a daily bases.
So any ideas anyone?
TIA
Message was edited by: Scottishengineer

...
There's an interesting thread there:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1366101
down at the bottom there's this post by the bryceman, that sums it all up for people that don't want to fiddle around with the Terminal:
+"Thanks Julien, that Launch Services put me in the right direction too and now my Leopard Mail Entire Message Search is FIXED!!!+
+My Original Post is here:+
+http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7462907#7462907+
+Posted by: DaveC+
+This is a known issue. Check out:+
+http://www.betalogue.com/2008/02/25/mac-os-x-105-tip-repairing-broken-spotlight- searches-in-mail/+
+http://www.betalogue.com/2008/03/28/mac-os-x-105-broken-spotlight-indexing-for-m ail-messages-caused-by-presence-of-older-mail-application/+
+Thanks Dave. I went to Betalogue and went through all the posts and I finally found a way to fix the Search Entire Message Spotlight problem in Apple Mail - at least it worked for me. I have been trying to fix this with all sorts of solutions for months and it turns out it was related to a problem with the Launch Services Database. I confirmed this by looking inside my user/library/mail folder and seeing that inside each Mailbox folder, the sub mailboxes all had standard folder icons and not the inbox tray style icons.+
+Note that you can easily fix this through Terminal Commands, and not all the following steps are completely necessary, but there are many people looking at these threads that want to just push buttons...+
+== So here are my simple steps to fixing Apple Mail Search ==+
+1. Attach and turn on any external hard drives you have that may have a copy of Mail.app on them+
+2. Delete all OLD copies of Mail.app that you can find (don't worry about Time Machine), but make sure you keep the latest version of Mail.app in your working Applications folder.+
+~ This is so that the LaunchServices database won't easily become corrupt again+
+3. Install the latest version of Onyx - free to use and download from www.macupdate.com+
+~ I suggest Onyx, because some people don't want to mess with the Terminal.+
+4. Quit all open applications and run Onyx (it will want to check your Hard Drive etc...that's OK).+
+5. Go to the Maintenance pane and then the Rebuild tab and select only the LaunchServices box. Click Execute.+
+~ This should fix the primary problem with searches+
+6. When that process finishes, select only the Mail's Envelope Index box. Click Execute.+
+~ This should fix related problems with other searches+
+7. When that process finishes, select only the Spotlight Index box. Click Execute. (This process of Rebuilding your Spotlight Index could take hours depending on how big your hard drive is).+
+~ This will give you a clean fast Spotlight database that Mail uses for Entire Message searches.+
+8. Quit Onyx+
+9. Open Mail.app and test your Entire Message Search!+
====
+Hope that helps - it certainly, finally, did for me!+
Bryce."
If I was to do this myself, using Onyx that I've downloaded, and as described above, should I do it from the internal on to the clone? The trouble is I have 1 and a half days left with this computer and I need to use the 'Entire Message' search with mail practically that whole time as I'm totaling a large invoice for a client whilst looking at hundreds emails related to them, this is a nightmare.
Can you recommend me a cloud service that will let me download on to my emergency computer that's an old G4 Powermac with Panther? A tried ADrive and kept on getting the 302 error cod, and tried DriveHQ but it tells me to 'insert the volume related to the file' ............ these seem to work fine when downloading to my intel MBP though ....
Message was edited by: Scottishengineer

Search entire message not working in Mail, but Spotlight works.

I am having a problem where my mail App is not searching the entire body of the message any more. I installed Lion soon after it was released, and I believe that it has been working up until recently.
If I do a search, it won't search the message body, and gives me no option to search for "Message contains" (just "People" and "Subjects"). If search for subject "foo" and then click on the "Subject" pull down menu, it shows "Subject" and "Entire Message", but "Entire Message" is greyed out.
I've done a lot of web searching and most people with similar problems had problems with Spotlight.
If I do a Spotlight search, it does find all of the mail messages correctly. Its just the Mail app that won't let me search.
I haven't tried re-indexing spotlight yet because spotlight seems to be working okay.
Note that all of my mail accounts are "POP" accounts with the mail stored locally on my machine.
Has anyone else encountered this?
Thanks,
Ron

I should have tried this before posting, but a reboot fixed my problem.

Spotlight / search entire message stopped working!?

Hi, whenever I type anything into the search bar, and I have 'entire message' selected, it ALWAYS returns 0 results.
Even when it blatantly should.
Any ideas folks?
thanks in advance
Gwyn
xxxxxxxx

Telling Spotlight to re-index the disk might have solved your problem:
Re: Search Entire Message Not Working After Fresh OS Install
Deleting anything shouldn't have to be necessary. If it "fixed" your problem it could be just because that caused Spotlight to update the index accordingly.
What is weird about the other thread Ernie was referring to is that Mail couldn't find messages that Spotlight could, which I still don't know whether was also your case or not. I troubleshooted a similar case a few weeks ago, which I believe was caused by permissions issues. Unfortunately, the OP didn't provide feedback as to whether what I suggested there fixed anything or not:
Spotlight non-functional

I have a macbook pro version 10.7.5 and my mailbox will not open at all and comes up with a quit message even though it is not open. how can i get into my account. it works on my iPhone an i have internet and all other functions working on my computer

I have a macbook pro version 10.7.5 and my mailbox will not open at all and comes up with a quit message even though it is not open. how can i get into my account. it works on my iPhone and i have internet and all other functions working on my computer

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Step 1
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the name of the crashed application or process in the Filter text field. Select the messages from the time of the last crash, if any. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.
Step 2
In the Console window, look under User Diagnostic Reports (not "Diagnostic and Usage Messages") for crash reports related to the crashed process. The report name starts with the name of the process, and ends with ".crash". Select the most recent report and post the entire contents—the text, not a screenshot. I know the report is long. Please post all of it anyway.
In the interest of privacy, I suggest that, before posting, you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.)
Please don’t post other kinds of diagnostic report—they're very long and rarely helpful.

In OS Yosemite the search function in Mail, Finder, Spotlight- does not work

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)
2,6 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB
OS Yosemite,
Finder versión 10.10.1
Mail Versión 8.1 (1993)
In OS Yosemite the search function in Mail, Finder, Spotlight… does not work. Messages or documents with the search criteria are there and one could find them manually, but the search function fails to find them. Following advice from Apple Support (728965377):
1. I applied an Apple protocol for adware removal (Remove unwanted adware that displays pop-up ads and graphics on your Mac); I had none, because I had formally utilized a similar protocol that I had found in Internet, actually an app that implemented automatically Apple's adware removal protocol.
2. I rebuild the post boxes in Mail (Mail (Yosemite): Reconstruir buzones); It took a while but it functioned properly
3. I re-install the System (OS X Yosemite: Reinstalar OS X); It took about 4 hours but there was no problem whatsoever with the installation.
Afterwards I searched for messages in Mail, and documents in Finder and Spotlight, without any difficulty. The search function in all of them was working properly. But the next time that I needed to search messages or documents, an hour later or so, the problem reappear and a couple of new issues occurred:
1. in app RagTime 6.5.2 (Build 1821), www.ragtime.de, the menu bar disappears (it is invisible), when one performs certain operations, e. g., calculating a value with a formula, whether it is in a spreadsheet or some other component (text, drawing, etc.). After touching with the cursor the menu bar is visible again.
2. after reading an e-mail in Mail or copying an address, this is seeing as a floating object in the finder and over every application. There is no logical way to get rid of the floating object and neither copying or deleting or cutting it. It is not a big issue but nonetheless bothersome.
3. In Mail, messages with Flag or in VIP contacts cannot be seen in the appropriate folders, only in the Incoming mail folder, together with other messages. It seems to me, this issue is part of same search function problem.
4. The preview function within Mail does not show the attached documents to a message, whether it is in the IN, OUT or Draft boxes.

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then try again to re-index Spotlight. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name or email address, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Mail on disk image, Spotlight can find messages, but "entire message" can't

For security purposes I've moved my to a disk image. For details on how to do this, see:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5837719
It's a relatively easy thing to do as long as you make sure that a symbolic link exists to your new Mail disk image's volume from ~/Library/Mail.
Getting to the point: Spotlight is able to find my mail messages when the disk image is mounted. So far -- no problem.
The catch is this: Mail->Search->"Entire Message" is completely broken. I get zero results, no matter what the query is. Finder Spotlight searches are able to find results for the same queries. We're talking about local mbox folders, not online IMAP folders. Searches within Mail in To/From work fine.
I've tried the following suggestions, scoured from various help forums:
-- repairing disk permissions
-- rebuilding the Spotlight index
-- deleting Envelope Index and re-importing my messages
-- vacuuming the SQLite databases
None of these suggestions helped.
I've caught wind of this on other forums, but so far there doesn't seem to be a definitive fix, unless I've missed something. I'm not sure if the fact that I'm running Mail from a disk image is particularly germaine to the issue, either.
Any ideas on how to get Search working for entire messages again?
This is on 10.5.1, clean install. (This is a new MacBook.)

Leopard Mail Entire Message Search - FIXED!!!
My Original Post is here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7462907#7462907
Posted by: DaveC
This is a known issue. Check out:
http://www.betalogue.com/2008/02/25/mac-os-x-105-tip-repairing-broken-spotlight- searches-in-mail/
http://www.betalogue.com/2008/03/28/mac-os-x-105-broken-spotlight-indexing-for-m ail-messages-caused-by-presence-of-older-mail-application/
Thanks Dave. I went to Betalogue and went through all the posts and I finally found a way to fix the Search Entire Message Spotlight problem in Apple Mail - at least it worked for me. I have been trying to fix this with all sorts of solutions for months and it turns out it was related to a problem with the Launch Services Database. I confirmed this by looking inside my user/library/mail folder and seeing that inside each Mailbox folder, the sub mailboxes all had standard folder icons and not the inbox tray style icons.
Note that you can easily fix this through Terminal Commands, and not all the following steps are completely necessary, but there are many people looking at these threads that want to just push buttons...
*== So here are my simple steps to fixing Apple Mail Search ==*
1. Attach and turn on any external hard drives you have that may have a copy of Mail.app on them
2. Delete all OLD copies of Mail.app that you can find (don't worry about Time Machine), but make sure you keep the latest version of Mail.app in your working Applications folder.
~ This is so that the LaunchServices database won't easily become corrupt again
3. Install the latest version of Onyx - free to use and download from www.macupdate.com
~ I suggest Onyx, because some people don't want to mess with the Terminal.
4. Quit all open applications and run Onyx (it will want to check your Hard Drive etc...that's OK).
5. Go to the Maintenance pane and then the Rebuild tab and select only the LaunchServices box. Click Execute.
~ This should fix the primary problem with searches
6. When that process finishes, select only the Mail's Envelope Index box. Click Execute.
~ This should fix related problems with other searches
7. When that process finishes, select only the Spotlight Index box. Click Execute. (This process of Rebuilding your Spotlight Index could take hours depending on how big your hard drive is).
~ This will give you a clean fast Spotlight database that Mail uses for Entire Message searches.
8. Quit Onyx
9. Open Mail.app and test your Entire Message Search!
====
Hope that helps - it certainly, finally, did for me!
Bryce.

Seacrh not working for "entire message", Help!

Worked once but not anymore on my new MacPro.
Search works for "To", "From" and "Subject" but not for "Entire Message".
Really annoying as I use email to conduct most of my business.
Does anyone have a solution please?
Thanks!

Hi Roland,
I'm not an expert here, but have had a similar issue. Here's what you can try:
If you have an IMAP mail account and you have changed the preference for keeping copies of messages for offline viewing (in the Advanced settings of the Mail Accounts preferences) from the default ("Keep all messages and their attachments"), then an Entire Message search will not return any results. Change the preference back to the default and search again.
You might need to synchronize the mailboxes on your computer with those on your mail server. To synchronize mailboxes for all mail accounts, choose Mailbox > Synchronize All Accounts. To synchronize mailboxes for a specific account, choose Mailbox > Synchronize and then select the account.
If an Entire Message search doesn't work after synchronizing a mailbox, you might need to rebuild the mailbox.
Hope this helps!!
Lora

Spotlight does not search by contact in Messages

Can anyone please help me or at least explain to me why this is happening to my Messages app
1. This image shows my Messages Inbox. Note that I have messages from Mike De Castro, Sandy Layug and Chris Santos.
2. Problem is when I search using Spotlight within Messages. In most cases, Spotlight does not behave correctly. I am able to type in the word i want to search but it doesn't seem to search the Contacts -- only the content.
(a) tried searching for "Sandy", it didn't give any search results;
(b) tried searching "Mike", it gave me a message from Mike De Castro (contact search) and a message from Khai (content search);
(c) tried searching "Chris", it only gave me messages that contains the word "chris" in the message but no contact named "Chris".
This has been a pain in the *** since I search messages by Contact and not by content. This works fine before.
I hope you could help me find a solution to this. Tried the search on my wife's 4s (5.0.1) and it works properly.
I am using a 4s on IOS 6.0.1.
On Spotlight Search under General Settings, Contacts has a check mark.
This happens in Messages only. Searching by contact in Mail works fine.

I had this same problem. Called apple and no fix. I completely reset my phone (erased everything) and set it up as a new phone again. Works perfect now. Go to Settings- General - Reset - Erase all content and settings.

Mail no longer does Entire Message search

I am no longer able to get Mail to do an "Entire Message" search. When I type a word in the Search box, the 'Entire Message' button appears "grayed out", and the only options available with All Mailboxes are From, To, and Subject. I did a Rebuild, I checked the settings in Preferences for searching Trash, Junk, Encrypted Messages (not that those should matter), I'm using a POP server, etc This seems to have just started since the 10.5.7 update. (help! thanks <Edited by Host>)

bbbbobbb,
Quit Mail, open System Preferences>Spotlight>Privacy, and add your Macintosh HD to the list. Wait a couple of minutes, and then remove your Macintosh HD from the Privacy list. You should notice (after a short delay) that Spotlight is reindexing your HD. After Spotlight completes the index, open Mail and see if your search works.
;~)

Spotlight does not work with Thunderbird? mdimporter installed but no work

Hello,
additional to my Apple-Mail i still use Thunderbird for my old PC-Accounts and the old mails.
Thunderbird runs quite well, but the Mac-OS Spotlight does not find anything within the Mails stored in Thunderbird.
The mdimporter from Mozilla is installed,
I made reboots, re-Index, Double-Clicks, added the thunderbird-Folder to the private and removed again and everything else i could find anywhere.
Nothing works.
Anybody here who might give me a useful hint?
Kind regards
Falk

ok this is some extra piece of software which seems to create a separate index for Thunderbird emails outside of the database files which can then be searched by spotlight. I don't use it so can't comment on this directly. one obvious thing is that you'd have to include system files in your search before you see any results from the thunderbird folder because all this stuff lives inside your user Library. to include system files in a search start finder search using command+f, click on "kind" scroll and click on "other". in the resulting popup select 'system files' and change the settings to include them in the search.

Spotlight does not work with my Lacie d2 drive connected.

I, like many others, have been struggling with the case of Spotlight shannigans for some time since it stopped working smoothly on the release of 10.4.8, I think. Anyway no amount of privacy setting, re-indexing, SystemUI force quitting or crying seemed ti fix the problem. Then - in a trial and error experiment the likes of which I had never undertaken before - I found the culprit. Spotlight does not work when my Lacie d2 Extreme 200GB is connected. No matter if it is connected by USB, Firewire or Daisychained - as soon as the computer sees it is plugged in - Spotlight (and all other search functions) dies.
Thinking it was simply a case of fixing something on the drive, I updated the firmware, completely deleted and repaired the disk and thought it would start afresh. Unfortunately this was not the case - so now I have to decide between having Spotlight working, or having my external drive connected.
Does anyone have any ideas at all of what else I could try to do?

Hi there - I've reformatted it twice, once as OSX Extended, and Once as OSX Extended Journalled. Neither really made much difference. As a quick work around, I managed to add it to the privacy list before the computer had a chance to index it - so far so good, but I can't search the drive. Better that than the alternative though! The only other weird thing was it did work straight out of the box with no problems for almost 3 years - it was just the move to the New iMac and an update or two that started the snafu.

No "Entire Message"-results, though Spotlight does work

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