What the $%^& is wrong with Spotlight?

[LincolnsiPod]

This is now two different Mac machines I'm experiencing this issue, one that was a fresh install.

The first sign I notice of Spotlight breaking is that my flagged emails disappear. When I do a test search in Spotlight, I noticed it only shows results for bookmarks and the dictionary, nothing else, even though that keyphrase should have brought up results in my contacts, calendar, emails, etc. Rebuilding the index doesn't fix ****.

If I reboot, my flagged emails return for five seconds then disappear again. Sometimes when I open Spotlight and input a key term there's a bar indicating that it's indexing.

Being able to search and flag email is crucial for me and I am getting tired of Spotlight ****ing up my daily workflow. Anyone else noticing issues? I'm sick of this ****.

 

[LincolnsiPod]

Testing this further, I noticed Spotlight seems to be in a perpetual state of indexing, which is why re-indexing fixes nothing. Used my Macbook today and battery depleted in 3 hours because of Spotlight indexing and indexing and indexing and indexing and indexing and indexing and indexing and indexing and indexing and indexing

What the **** is this thing doing?

I'm wondering if it's related to to Microsoft Exchange being one of my internet connected accounts which I'm using for mail. A friend thinks it's enterprise related, but setting the account to inactive doesn't do anything, unless I'm not keeping it inactive long enough.

Is there any way to trouble shoot this and see what's triggering Spotlight to endlessly index?

 

[Honza1]

Not sure, but few years ago I had similar issue and fix turned out to be reinstall the same version of OSX Over the current one. It is relatively painless. Nothing should break, but backup is critically important anyway.
Reinstall over existing system is shortest way of fixing system, usually faster than searching for cause and fixing it. It may not fix anything, but usually does not break anything either...

 

[LincolnsiPod]

Turned out to be something completely unexpected that reinstalling wouldn't have fixed: The issue was being caused by using the Pinterest Pin It addon with Firefox. Whenever I used that combo, mds_stores process went to 100% and triggered an endless reindex. I was able to consistently trigger this every time by disabling and re-enabling Pinterest. This only happens using the Firefox version. Craziest thing I've ever seen and makes no sense at all.

Needless to say I deleted not just the addon but Firefox as well, and all is well again.