Search works in spotlight, but not in Mail.app

Question

If I type in the search box in Mail, nothing happens. The same query in Spotlight works. What can I do to fix that?
G4   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Answer 1

> I don't use the .mac address, but I guess it's a .mac account.
Still not sure what you mean. It cannot be a .Mac account if it doesn’t have a .Mac address associated with it, and your mail cannot be stored on a .Mac server if you don’t have a .Mac account... What does Mail show in Preferences > Accounts > Account Information > Account Type?
Anyway, I don’t know how to solve the problem in your case. When searching in Spotlight doesn’t work, the problem can be fixed by re-creating the Spotlight database. When searching in Spotlight works but Entire Message searches in Mail don’t, re-creating Mail’s index usually fixes the problem, but not always and I don’t know why.
Try this to try to identify the problem:
1. Open /Applications/Utilities/Console.
2. From the File menu, choose either Open Console Log, or Open System Log, or both, so that Console displays the contents of both system.log and console.log.
3. Reproduce the problem and look at the bottom of the Console windows for messages that might be written there as a result. They may provide some clues.
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You may try setting up Mail again from scratch and importing your mail back, but I don’t know whether that will work either:
1. If you have a .Mac account and .Mac synchronization of Mail data is enabled either in Mail > Preferences > General or in System Preferences > .Mac, disable it before proceeding.
2. Quit Mail if it’s running.
3. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/. Move (not copy) the entire Mail folder out of there, to the Desktop.
4. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Preferences/. Locate com.apple.mail.plist and move it to the Desktop.
5. Open Mail and set it up again from scratch. If given the option to import existing mailboxes or something like that, don’t. Just enter the account information and check that everything works fine.
6. You’ll have to re-configure all your settings in Mail > Preferences. For spam-related security reasons, the first thing you should do is go to Preferences > Viewing and disable Display remote images in HTML messages if it’s enabled.
7. If Mail works fine now and you had any messages stored in local mailboxes, do File > Import Mailboxes, choose Mail for Mac OS X as the data format, and follow the instructions to import your mail from the old Mail folder that’s now on the Desktop. Import the Mailboxes folder first, then each of the POP-username@mailserver account folders.
8. If .Mac synchronization of Mail data was enabled at the beginning, enable it again, go to System Preferences > .Mac > Advanced, click Reset Sync Data, and choose the appropriate options to reset the Mail data stored on the .Mac server with the data locally stored on the computer, i.e. sync data must flow from the computer to the .Mac server.
As a result of doing the above, some messages may be duplicated. Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts has a Remove Duplicates script that you may find useful.
Do with the imported mail whatever you wish. You may move the messages anywhere you wish and get rid of the imported mailboxes afterwards.
If all is well and you don’t miss anything, the files on the Desktop can be deleted, although you may want to keep them for a while, just in case.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. You can easily locate any of the folders referred to in this post by copying the folder path here, doing Go > Go to Folder in the Finder, and pasting the folder path there.