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A possible fix broken search in macOS Mail

Over the weekend, I wrote about my totally useless search in Mail. I got so frustrated by my inability to search in Mail that I decided it was time to for a complete rebuild. I exported all my locally-saved mail, deleted my accounts, quit Mail, trashed its prefs and data files, rebooted, then rebuild it mailbox by mailbox, account by account.

I started with my iCloud account, which I barely use for anything—it has a total of seven messages in the inbox (four of which are iTunes Store receipts), and only 121 sent messages. As a test, I searched for Linea, an excellent drawing app that I had recently purchased. No matches.

At that point, I decided to quit Mail and force Spotlight to rebuild its index overnight. In Terminal, sudo mdutil -i on / will do just that (and take many hours). Today, opened Mail, and search was still dead. Argh! (I had also tried this suggested fix, but it made no difference.)

But doing some random testing today, I discovered a fix! It's a weird fix, but it seems to work:

If I move all the messages from an inbox or local storage folder into a different local storage folder, they'll be indexed and findable. I can then move them back into the inbox or source folder, and they remain findable.
Even more important, newly-added messages seem to be properly indexed, in both the inboxes and the local storage folders.

This doesn't make any sense to me, as any one of my recent actions—rebuilding mailbox indexes, reimporting, and redoing the entire Spotlight index—should have been enough to force a rebuild. But for whatever reason, only manually moving the messages seems to force a rebuild.

Now pardon me while I go back to manually dragging a quarter-million email messages around…

33 thoughts on “A possible fix broken search in macOS Mail”

  1. So you need to move all the email to a local folder (thereby deleting it off the IMAP/Exchange/GApps server) and then push it all back up to the server - just to get Mail to see them in the Spotlight index? Yet, if you use a Spotlight search or 3rd party utilities, the emails are indexed in the Spotlight database? Nice going Apple!

    1. Most of my archive is already in local storage, so it's mainly just moving it around on the hard drive. But yes, the few messages still sitting on servers had to be copied down to the Mac, then copied back to the IMAP server.

      -rob.

  2. Rob, you of course know about the excellent utility MsgFiler, yes? http://msgfiler.com -- this will let you semi-automate the 'manual' moving of tons of messages... with its 'Engine' addon, it's super fast. I think I've experienced a variant of this problem you've seen. Somehow, sometimes, a message won't get 'seen' by my filtering rules, and I'll have to move it *back to the Inbox* (or, as you've discovered, any other mailbox) - then re-apply filtering rules, for it to actually get filtered. Seems like this is related. Somehow the database gets out of sync w/ the UI (or something), and manually (i.e., via the UI) moving something around, *re-alerts* the database to... the existence of these messages, in terms of indexing, or in terms of filtering.

    1. Yea, I used to use MsgFiler, but when I was trying to clean up this issue a while back I purged everything out of Mail, just to see if that helped. I should probably add it back :).

      -rob.

    2. Thanks, Ed. Is there a place I can go to get more explicit directions on how to do this with Msgfiler?
      Thanks
      Robert

  3. The same work around also works for Notes. When search doesn't work, move them all to a new folder, then copy them back to the original folder and trash the folder you just created. Search will work again. Don't know how this fixes anything but it works, in other apps as well it seems.

    1. There is a relationship, at some level, between Notes and Mail. Remember that in some version of OS X, Notes were integrated (by default) in Mail. Now, when you create a new Mail account, you're asked if you'd like to use it for Notes, Mail, or both. I imagine they must use the same database on the backend.

      Good to know the same fix works.

      -rob.

      1. Exchange, Google and iCloud all have Notes as a part of the account; back in the day when we ran our own Dovecot imap server, Notes objects were stored in a specific account folder on the server as ordinary mail messages.

        When we transitioned to Exchange we had to download the notes and re-add them into the new account.

        They're treated as separate things in Outlook or Notes, but notes in an exchange account are just essentially email messages, just like everything else in an Exchange server. I suspect the same holds for Google and iCloud accounts as well.

  4. Kitty Bucholtz

    It worked! Thanks so much for letting us know. I've told others, as well. I even have to move my Sent mail to a folder and back in order to search that, too. Sigh. Seriously, thanks a million!! :)

  5. This is crazy, but dam, it works. Thank you for saving me from losing my mind!! My email is really my management system, frail as it is, its the most convenient way to track all my clients and projects. If that doesn't work, I can't work. You saved me!

    Gratefully yours, almost-200K-messages-to-move.

    1. Just create a new folder in Mail, in the "On my Mac" section, and move the messages into it. Let them sit for a bit, then move them back.

      -rob.

  6. Hi Rob, Just to clarify, when I do this does it force a reindex of only the messages that I move, or does it force a reindex of all messages? i.e. do I have to do this trick for all the messages in each folder I have separately in order to fix search for all of them?

    Mail search hasn't worked reliably for years. Yet it's a basic essential feature. Apple shouldn't allow Mail to ship like this, let alone for years running without fixing or even acknowledging the problem... I've wasted so much time trying to fix it... incredibly frustrating...

    1. Just tried it and I can answer my own question for the benefit of anyone else reading this: every mailbox and sub-mailbox has to be done separately. It only reindexes what you move. This is going to be time consuming seeing as I have a ton of sub-mailboxes, but at least this is a hack that works. After a year fighting with Mail to get it to do basic searches properly this is the only thing I've seen that does. I guess that's progress, though not on Apple's part.

  7. Thanks a lot! I just ran into this problem and I was desperate. I cannot use my mail without a reliable search capability. The suggested fix worked. It seems that you might not have to move all mail out from/back to a mailbox, only parts of it. At least this worked for me. Why cannot Apple fix such a really bad bug like this one in one year? I was ready to switch to Outlook, which could have been a big job. I have Office 365 and it works well. The only remaining Apple SW products that I still use on my Mac are Mail and Safari, which I am considering replacing because of its terrible Bookmarks that cannot be sorted and searched. This gave me some time to decide if I replace Mail w. Outlook. It is unfortunate that the quality of Apple's sw became this deplorable.

  8. A massive big thanks. I have just updated to 10.13.2 High Sierra and had exactly the problem you described. I created another mailbox on my hard drive and shifted the messages into it and then back into the Inbox. Worked like a dream and I can suddenly find what was previously invisible.

  9. Thanks Rob - worked for me too. After much pulling of hair this has been only solution that has worked. Well done

  10. In my case, after trying the above and every solution on many forums discussing this, what worked was REINSTALLING MACOS FROM THE RECOVER MODULE. Took about an hour, all software and 350GB+ data intact. It was have saved me and my client many hours of work, disruption and downtime if I had tried that first, instead of: deleting Envelope Index files, Rebuilding mailboxes, deleting all data from ~/Library/Mail + com.apple.mail.plist, reindexing Macintosh HD, Disk Utility First Aid, etc., etc.

    1. John,
      Thanks for this! I had the same issues and doing a reinstall is what worked!

      I should note that in my case, it wasn't just Mail.app that managed to get a corrupted Spotlight index or whatever -- Outlook 2019 for Mac did too -- and the problems started at the same time.

      In my case, I'm blaming some maintenance script I let Clean My Mac X run that unbeknownst basically reset a lot of my macOS settings (dock icons, desktop preferences, etc.). Total PITA but a reinstall over the existing install did the trick!

  11. Mac OS is rapidly becoming terrible. I have the same trouble with Macmail, as above, and I also have the well-documented problem whereby my OS won't accept the upgrades i am offered without a time consuming re-install.
    The latest re-install finally got my machine to accept 10.13.4 but has absolutely not resolved the mail searching problems.
    I'm currently attempting the 'move messages' trick described here but, thus far, not having success with that... Grrrrr, I suspect i'll be switching to Outlook very soon...
    Starting to wonder if it's even worth staying with Mac at all these days?!?

  12. I had the same problem and was getting desperate so many thanks for finding this fix. In my case it was enough to move just one message at random and the problem was solved! So it might not be necessary to move everything...

  13. I've been hunting for a solution to this as well. Rob's experience got me thinking of a possible quicker solution for those of us who have a boat load of email folders under the "On my Mac" section of mail, which would take years to manually copy and replace as suggested by Rob. I tested exporting and re-importing all folders under "On My Mac" and it worked like a charm! Mac Mail reindexed those folders and their contents as if they were new. Here's a link to an article on how to properly Export and then Import mail folders... https://support.apple.com/guide/mail/import-or-export-mailboxes-mlhlp1030/mac

    A couple important notes (very important, please read)...

    1) Make sure and choose the "Options" button under the initial window where you choose your destination folder when Exporting, and select to "Export all subfolders". This will ensure that your folder structure is maintained.

    2) When Importing again, choose "Apple Mail" as the option in the opening window, not "Files in mbox format". This can be a bit confusing based on the instructions under the above link.

    3) Don't delete the original folder/folders until you've tested this (tested the re-imported ones) to make sure it worked as expected. Spot check the emails for accuracy by comparing the contents with that of the original folders.

    1. As noted in my writeup, I had done that (multiple times) and it didn't change a thing.

      -rob.

  14. Edward Levinson

    Hello. Will most of these methods above work with El Capitain OS 10.11.6? I don't want to upgrade higher than this, which is what I am running now and which is the limiit for my old computer. Thanks in advance,

    1. I honestly don't know, perhaps someone else will. As all you're doing is rebuilding indexes, you can't harm your actual messages, so you could just test and see.

      regards;
      -rob.

  15. davidflynncomau

    Just adding to this: I experienced the exact same problem (under 10.14.6 Mojave), all of a sudden I was unable to search within the Mail app, and also my Smart Mailboxes had stopped working. I tried rebuilding mailboxes, no joy. I tried re-indexing spotlight, no joy. Then I tried the method mentioned here and it worked! I didn't even need to move my entire Inbox to a newly-created local folder - I accidentally moved my Sent Mail to that new local folder, realised my mistake, moved those sent emails back to their original folder and all of a sudden, my mail search and smart mailboxes were working again! So, I would suggest then even moving the contents of a small-ish mailbox to a local mail folder seems to do the trick and 'force' a re-creation of the entire Mail search index.

  16. I have the same problem with my search engine in Mail.app, but the solution of moving some emails to a local folder and back didn't work for me. I'm on Mojave and Spotlight is working, so this Mail.app bug got me frustrated. Can someone describe what you exactly did?

  17. It's pretty well laid out in the post: I dragged a bunch of emails from an unsearchable folder into another folder, checked Search, then moved them back to the first.

    -rob.

  18. Thanks for your reply Rob. Unfortunately that didn't work for me. I'm now trying a new fix from another forum:

    1) Quit Mail.app

    2) Stop, Clear, and Restart your Spotlight indexation. To do so : https://support.apple.com/HT201716 OR

    Open Terminal.app
    Stop and Flush Indexation
    sudo mdutil -i off -E /
    verify the status
    sudo mdutil -s /
    Restart it
    sudo mdutil -i on /
    verify the status again
    sudo mdutil -s /
    3) Clear the Mail.app indexes. You will find some "Envelope Index*" files in your ~/Library/Mail/V7/MailData folder. Trash them and empty the Trash. (They will be rebuild after relaunching Mail.app, don't worry).

    To do so:

    From the Finder > Goto Menu > Go to folder: "~/Library/Mail/V7/MailData".
    From the Terminal.app: "open ~/Library/Mail/V7/MailData" (then Enter)

    Restart your Mac. Re-open Mail.app, and all we be fine again.

    PS: You need all those steps, and in this order ;-)

  19. Thank you. I'm a 35 year Mac software developer and my mail.app search broke months ago on Mojave 10.14. Did the rebuild, trashed the sqlite index files, rebuilt the spotlight DBs, reinstalled the OS (!) nothing fixed the problem except move out/move back. I wound up doing the full export/re-import in dzyner's post after I verified a manual move worked with the INBOX. (It's true I haven't done a fresh install in almost 20 years, and I have hundreds of thousands of emails going back to Eudora days, so I'm sure that has something to with it.) Anyway, this has fixed a year of annoyance. Appreciated.

    1. Hi Ward,

      When you say "move out/move back" what you really did?

      1- Go to ~/Mail
      2- move the folder to the desktop
      3- open Mail app
      4- close Mail app
      5- Move back the Mail folder from the Desktop to the ~/
      6- Open Mail app?

      Is that it?
      I've done everything and nothing worked (except your tip)

      Thanks
      Marco

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