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Spotlight Won't Index Mail

Spaceboy88

Spaceboy88

macrumors regular
Original poster
Spotlight is indexing everything on my system but Mail messages.

I have re-indexed Spotlight, tried the rebuild mailbox settings and used ONYX to clear caches and optimize the system all to no avail.

Is there anything else I can try before doing a re-install of Leopard?

Thanks,

Tim
 
What happens if you search within Mail? Nothing?

Update: I had a similar issue when I first installed Leopard. My main drive was listed in the privacy list in the Spotlight preferences.
 
abrooks said:
What happens if you search within Mail? Nothing?

Update: I had a similar issue when I first installed Leopard. My main drive was listed in the privacy list in the Spotlight preferences.
Click to expand...

Nothing comes up if "entire message" is selected. To, From and Subject do work, but that's it.

My drive is not listed under privacy settings.
 
I'm in the same boat

I have the exact same problem. Do you have a solution yet? Are you running act-on plug-ins? I am and they work, but the "Entire Message" filtering doesn't work at all.

Chris
 
Solution to "Entire Message" problem ?

I had the same problem.
"Entire Message" in Mail wasn't working for hidden reasons (same for Spotlight).
I did try many suggestions found in some forum. None worked.
After 2 days, I solved it.

I hope, following trick will be suitable to all of you having the same problem:

I went to Spotlight Preferences.
I did add "Mail" folder (located in /library/mail) to "Privacy" list.
After a few minutes (time necessary to desactivate Mail folder indexing process), I deleted Mail from the "Privacy" list.

A few minutes later, i tried Mail and "Entire message" was active again.

Hope my trick will work for you,

Best from Belgium,

Alain
 
Spotlight not indexing mail

Belgo1 said:
I had the same problem.
"Entire Message" in Mail wasn't working for hidden reasons (same for Spotlight).
I did try many suggestions found in some forum. None worked.
After 2 days, I solved it.

I hope, following trick will be suitable to all of you having the same problem:

I went to Spotlight Preferences.
I did add "Mail" folder (located in /library/mail) to "Privacy" list.
After a few minutes (time necessary to desactivate Mail folder indexing process), I deleted Mail from the "Privacy" list.

A few minutes later, i tried Mail and "Entire message" was active again.

Hope my trick will work for you,

Best from Belgium,

Alain
Click to expand...
IT WORKED! You ought to call Apple and tell them, because everything they suggested DID NOT WORK. No one needs the long winded set of instructions posted on that "other" web site. You are a genius.
 
Of course the short fix worked (and will work for everyone who upgraded from Tiger to Leopard) - obvsiously during the upgrade the index got corrupted and the short fix forces a complete rebuilding of the index the old fashioned way.

Vinny - I followed your comments and agreed with you up until the point I realized you never posted the DIRECT link on here. That's where you lost all credibility in context to your company's motivations for posting here. We all appreciate your efforts, otherwise, from the technical context.

-jim
 
lesliew said:
IT WORKED! You ought to call Apple and tell them, because everything they suggested DID NOT WORK. No one needs the long winded set of instructions posted on that "other" web site. You are a genius.
Click to expand...

I tried this too. Here's the weird thing: putting in a character string into Mail.app's Search window, with "Entire Contents" chosen, returns no hits, even when I can see the darn string in e-mail messages right there. When I go to Finder and put in the same string with that mailbox selected, it finds all the hits and shows up different e-mail message files. The problem is that I want to move the messages with hits to another mailbox. I suppose I could do this in Finder, but it would screw up the mailbox table of contents in both mailboxes. I would have to rebuild both of them.

So somehow, Mail.app is not availing itself of the index that Finder is using.
 
technogeek said:
I tried this too....

So somehow, Mail.app is not availing itself of the index that Finder is using.
Click to expand...

Frankly i didn't went to the inner functionalities of Finder indexing scheme.

As far as I remember, I had the same problem as you. "Entire Message" field didn't sent back all expected mails but some of them.

IMHO, you didn't do correctly what I suggested.

Best

Alain
 
So here I am 4 years later and spotlight will not work for me in mail and I have searched and search for a solution. I've had this problem before and easily fixed it. Then I installed Lion server and the problem won't go away. Here's what I've tried:

• Tried every hint I could find online: check preferences, repair permissions, reindex spotlight, delete and rebuild envelope files, reindex spotlight again
• Thought installing Mountain Lion might somehow fix it - it didn't
• Search in Calendars doesn't work at all - must resort to iPhone
• Used Lion install drive to reset permissions for the home folder

Does anyone have any fresh ideas? If not I guess I'll have to reinstall the OS. I fear that even this will not help and will waste precious time.
 
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