OS X Lion Mail - search feature

Searching through the thousands of emails on my laptop used to be easy with Snow Leopard. Within seconds I would search through entire messages, or who I sent to, or received from, or by subject. That simplicity seems to have been bleached out of Lion. Is anybody else having trouble with email search on Lion or is it just me?

I found another issue with the search function. I've noticed the search results do not include email messages placed in an archive folder I've created on my mac. Only messages which are located in the actual inboxes and sent items are included in the search items.
I can also confirm that the "from" list is incomplete. I've the idea that only contacts which are listed in the MS Exchange directory (of my university) are listed, in addition to my own contacts. Senders which I haven't saved in my contact list are missing.
Interesting to not is that spotlight is able to find the messages which are not listed via the Mail search.
Another thing: "entire message" does not include sender information: for instance, mails from dropbox only show up if I select "From", but not when I select "entire message". This is counter intuitive in my opinion. BTW, I just see that the term "dropbox" is almost always included in the main text, so it should show up, even if "entire message" does not search through the "From" section.
I find the new search function quite horrible to use. I hope someone is able to point out what I'm doing wrongly.
UPDATE:
I just created a new mailbox and moved a couple of "old" (pre-lion-received) messages which I was not able to find previously into the new mailbox and guess what happened: I now am able to find via the search funciton
UPDATE 2:
I think something went wrong when I upgraded to Lion. I've rebuilded all my old mailboxes and it now works fine. You can do the same by selecting your mailbox and click Mailbox -> Rebuild.
Message was edited by: Morrey

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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

My Mail search feature

My Mail search feature seems to have stopped finding anything. Why? I use this frequently to find old mail in my inbox or sent folder. It stopped finding anything about two weeks ago.

My Mail search feature seems to have stopped finding anything. Why? I use this frequently to find old mail in my inbox or sent folder. It stopped finding anything about two weeks ago.

My Mail search feature in Snow Leopard just stopped working

My search feature for Mail in snow leopard just stopped working. I had a system crash while trying to reformat a corrupted flash drive. Now when I search in mail it just spins the color wheel. Any suggestions?

Hello FredBus,
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Lion Mail Search Stopped Working

The search in my Lion Mail doesn't work at all. When you enter some text you get nothing. This is on my Mac Pro. On my Macbook Pro it works. I even deleted all the mail and let it reimport. I even reindexed spotlight. Next step is to remove all the accounts and start over. I stopped using Apple Mail because of this before and chose Thunderbird which works perfect, but Lion Mail came out so I thought to give it a try and it still doesn't work. I have to be able to search.

Brilliant, works every time!
Actually, you were the one who found the solution by trying the following statement:
    set CS_Messages to every message that subject contains "Daily Summary"
Have you any idea why my original script stopped working, just like to know to stop this happening again.
Since the original script has always worked flawlessly on my computer under OS X 10.8.1, the only thing I can think of would be another application interfering with Mail or AppleScript in your system.
By the way, the following version of the script might be somewhat faster when you have a huge number of messages in your mailbox:
set theContents to {}
set theContentsRef to a reference to theContents
tell application "Mail"
    tell mailbox "CS Notepad"
        tell mailbox "Test"
            set CS_Messages to every message that subject contains "Daily Summary"
            repeat with thisMessage in CS_Messages
                copy content of thisMessage to the end of theContentsRef
            end repeat
        end tell
    end tell
end tell
theContents
See the AppleScript Language Guide, Class Reference, list (p. 110 in the PDF version) : “For large lists, it is more efficient to use the a reference to operator when inserting a large number of items into a list, rather than to access the list directly.”
Message was edited by: Pierre L.

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:

Running Lion, mail search function suddenly stopped working

All of a sudden the search function in my Mac mail stopped working. No emails show up when I begin to search in any of me mailboxes. Still able to search in spotlight but not always effective in finding what I'm looking for. Desperately need to fix this as always referring to old emails for work.

You can rebuild your mail search indexes by following these instructions:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mail/3.0/en/14019.html
Cheers,
Rodney

Mountain Lion Mail Searching not working (entire search)

Hello,
I already searched the web and the topics in this forum, but found no help.
Since my update from 10.7 to 10.8 (with a clean install and a transition of my user data) the search 'Entire Message' oder 'any' does not work anymore. It shows no results.
This is very strange since Spotlight is still able to find content inside Mail messages.
There are some posts for similiar questions suggesting to rebuild either the whole spotlight index or just rebuild the mail index.
Others suggest to rebuild the mail database by either deleting the files inside the folder of the library or use the menu command in Mail.
Others suggest to check the rights of the mail folder and its content inside the user's library folder.
I tried all of this. Nothing helped yet.
Thanks for help
carl

I really tried everything but nothing helped.
But finally I solved the problem.
I made a timemachine backup (just for safety reasons).
Then I installed Mountain Lion again over the existing installation.
(I used a USB Stick with Mountain Lion to do that.)
Now everything works great.

Lion Mail Search

Ok got the Lion installed, stressless, but the Mail, so far nightmare. it looks great like iPad but the search is just kindergaten, can't search with message body as there are no options now does the search make sense. Anyone figured it out?

enter the search word to the search box, you will see a list pops up from the search box. for instance if you are searching apple. enter apple to the box. as soon as you type it in the box, a big box pops up. it suggest you massage contents "apple", people or subjects etc, choose the most likely one. when you choose it you will see the results on the left side of your screen. you can add more search word to the search box to decrease the posible emails.
i hope it helps

Lion Mail search a downgrade?

I've always been satisfied with the Mail.app search facility, until Lion. It works differently, and I can't locate things that were easily located before.
For instance, if I had searched "buy.com" prior to Lion, a list of the messages to and from buy.com would appear, even if "buy.com" only appeared in the address. Now a search yields nothing, even though I have messages from buy.com in my Mail folders.
Is there a way to cause Mail to search as effectively as it did before Lion, or is this a downgrade? This is definitely not an isolated issue for me. I am now constantly not able to locate messages I now are either in the Inbox or another folder, even when I search words that are in the body of a message.

If you want to downgrade, just use AppCleaner (google it) to delete Mail, then install an older version on your computer via apple website.
1) It doesn't take a special app to delete Mail.
2) Older versions of Mail will not run on a newer version of the OS.
3) There is nowhere online that you can legally download Mail, certainly not from the Apple web site.
4) If you were to find a copy of Mail to download, you'd be stupid to do so, since it could be malware and not actually Mail.
5) Since no part of your post would work even remotely, it's obvious you haven't tried this solution. Refer to item 2.5 in the Apple Support Communities Terms of Use.

Apple Mail search feature?

Is there a concise list anyplace that explains how to do boolean searches in Apple Mail, and all the various options?
Have found information scattered here & there, and help file offers general instructions but no information on how to actually make them work. Essentially says "you can do boolean searches".
Couple examples:
"If you began your search in the Spotlight menu in the upper-right corner of your screen, click Show All to switch to a search window."
Where is "Show All"?
Perform a Boolean query
A Boolean query uses AND, OR, and NOT (known as Boolean operators) to narrow the search results. You can also use a minus sign (-), meaning AND NOT, to exclude items when you search. Here are examples of what you might type in the search field when you use Boolean operators:
author:tom OR author:thom searches for items authored by Tom or Thom, if you don’t know the exact spelling of his name.
trip -france searches for items that contain the word “trip” but not “france,” so results might include photos from a trip to Spain but not to France.
Looking to search a message from person A, with the body or subject of the message containing text X. How do you type the second operator (above syntax doesn't seeem to work)? How does one even know what all the operators are without a list in a dialogue box like other email programs have?
Image below is an example of a search. Can't get a second operator to work:
http://tinyurl.com/77unn2w

That the text changes at all is the problem. I simply want to type a word, and search for it. The drop downs limits the choices, apparently, to what Mail thinks you want. If it's not there, you simply can't search.
Example below. I want to search for a message from "Roy". I type "Roy". Mail doesn't have an option to search the "from" field. Have seen that option other times, doesn't appear here for some reason.
Second issue: you can't get any options at all for a second search term without choosing one of the "pre-filled" choices that appear. There were some pre-filled choices further down, none of which applied. Clicking "Message contains "project" leaves you with no choices (to search the subject field, for example).

Mail search feature for Yahoo mail does not work in Firefox

the search box in yahoo mail is unresponsive. Had to open Yahoo mail in Chrome to do the search. I have the latest version of Firefox running on Vista.

Hello,
In order to better assist you with your issue please provide us with a screenshot. If you need help to create a screenshot, please see [[How do I create a screenshot of my problem?]]
Once you've done this, attach the saved screenshot file to your forum post by clicking the '''Browse...''' button below the ''Post your reply'' box. This will help us to visualize the problem.
Thank you!

Lion Mail search doesn't work

In Snow Leopard, I could search for a friend's name, and select "From" to see all messages sent to me by them. I can't seem to duplicate this in Lion. I type in the name, & all I get is a list of every email that mentions their name for any reason. This seems like a downgrade of functionality. Am I missing something in the interface?

Seems to work here ok:

Lion Mail Search Reset keyboard shortcut

Hi,
how to reset the currect search in Mail via the keyboard?
In Evernote for instance, you can press Cmd-R to reset the currect search.
Is there an equivalent for Mail?
Thanks,
Roger

Going from 10.5 to 10.6 is not removing functionality, it is adding functionality.
Are you using 10.6.x and can't use that command to get to the search field?
If so, try checking the Keyboard Shortcuts in Keyboard System Prefs and see if you've somehow got cmd+opt-F mapped to something else.

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.

OS X Lion Mail - search feature

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