Mail's Spotlight wont find ANYTHING

[chaos86]

i have a folder where I keep all the reciepts sent to me by ebay. if I search that folder, on entire message for 'ebay', 'notification', or any of the keywords in the names of items I've bought, spotlight turns up nothing. it doesn't matter what I search for, if it's in the message body of one email or 200, spotlight finds nothing. its the same for any other folder with any other search. READ: spotlight has never returned a single result in mail (but does great everywhere else, like finder and sys. prefs.)

help me I'm going insane trying to find emails I need.

(upgraded from panther, 10.3.9, now on tiger 10.4.1, powerbook 15, 1.33, 768, 60)

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

You haven't, by any chance, by accident or on purpose, added your Home folder to Spotlight's privacy list?

(Or added the Home folder to the privacy list and then removing it again to provoke Spotlight to re-index it?)

 

[chaos86]

nope it's not in the privacy list. I deleted every entry in the list (the standard ones) and they reappeared after a second or two, added my home folder, removed it, and waited. nothing in the little blue spotlight bar thing about indexing, left for an hour (to index if in fact that is what it's doing), came back, same as before.

 

[chaos86]

update:
i just noticed i can search keywords in the corner spotlight menu, and it will find them in mail messages, but I cant get any returns from searches in the mail built in spotlight field. weird huh? so it's not an indexing problem....

 

[mumblingmynah]

same thing

I have the exact same problem. I've even tried forcing Spotlight to reindex the drive, to no avail. It must be some sort of bug, I'm thinking.