Mail Search STILL not working!?!

[futureswitcher]

I just started using Apple mail to read my gmail accounts, and I'm pretty happy with it other than the fact that the search "entire message" function simply does not work!

I googled this and I came up with a ton of year+ old unresolved threads on a bunch of different websites - and none of them seemed to have a real solution.

Is anyone still having this problem? I'm assuming that a fix has been found because I haven't found any newer threads on the subject.

I have the latest version of both OS X 10.5 and Mail

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Several things to try:

1. The Mail.app speedup trick, here - just to rule out a corrupted Mail database.
2. Check your Spotlight exclusions - is Mail's folder in your user library, or any subfolders therein, on the exclude list?
3. Are you searching in the right place? This has tripped me up many times - Mail.app won't find stuff if you don't choose the right search parameters.

 

[Ice-Cube]

Try rebuilding your spotlight index:

Go to System Preferences and select Spotlight and then Privacy. Add your hard drive (Drag the Macintosh HD Icon from the desktop in there) and quit the preferences. Wait 3-6 mins. Now go back in and delete the hard drive (from the Privacy list). Spotlight will recreate its index and "missing" items will sometimes then show up.

 

[miles01110]

Save local copies "On My [Your] Mac." Spotlight will definitely find them then.

 

[futureswitcher]

Thanks everyone for your replies!

I rebuilt my mail database and then rebuilt my spotlight database...and It worked!

Thanks! I'm not sure which helped, but it wasn't because I had the privacy settings incorrect - I kept those the same.

There must have been some file corruption or something somewhere along the lines.

 

[mfearon]

Fixed mail search problem with OnyX permission repair

Recently I got mac mail and spotlight working when moving to a new mac.
Downloaded Eudora Mailbox Cleaner 4.9
I didn't realize at first that it migrated to eudora to mac mail, not eudora!
It also moved eudora nicknames to address book!

But searching "Entire Meaage" didn't work- cuz spotlight was dead.
tried several fixes- like using terminal -- command to rebuild the index
sudo mdutil -E -i on /
always gave "no index" as error

Loaded OnyX- tried several things to fix-
what finally did it was an OnyX fix permissions command AND reboot!
(why fixing permissions from disk utility didn't do it I can't say).
At boot the mds & mdworker processes started indexing and
have run for hours-
and searching "All Mailboxes" and "Entire Message" now works(!)