Q: Mail Search not working El Capitan

hm - did you wait long enough for Spotlight re-indexing? You can check progress by searching something like "test" and see the progress bar in the opening window. Takes some hours depending on the diskspace used.

Concerning mail: it helped in my case to first close mail and then deleting all 3 files beginning with "Envelope Index" in ~/Library/Mail/V3/MailData

Hi Michael,

I let it run all night, but the search function in mail still does not work. Regarding the Envelope Index mails, I did the same.  I emptied my spam and trash folders, closed out of mail and then deleting all three files.  I then re-booted and opened mail.  Re-indexing took almost 45 minutes, but the search functions still does not work - very frustrating!

This worked perfectly for me.   Thank you.

Thanks for the recommendation - unfortunately, the search function still does not work.  I even tried re-indexing mail manually, as well as through spotlight after completing your iCloud suggestion, but nothing - incredibly frustrating!

I have had the same results.  When I past a full email address into the search field, usually I get no results.  Then when I start deleting characters from the end of the address, I eventually get results. 

When I paste the email address into SpotLight, I see all of the results I know are there, but not the results when pasting that email address into the Mail search field. 

Solution?

Michael Wüthrich1's solution worked for me.

• Close Mac Mail
• Move the 3 files beginning with "Envelope Index" out of ~/Library/Mail/V3/MailData
• Launch Mac Mail - it will now start the process of re-importing your messages (took about half an hour as I had over 10,000 messages)

It seems that the process of indexing for search purposes takes a bit longer and continues in the background. Initially it didn't work as expected, but after an hour or so I'm getting better and better results.

I have tried all of the suggestions on this post several times each, but the search feature on my mail is still not functioning.  Any additional suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

In El Capitan, it's as Heinzmac indiated - it's under folder V3

Go to Mailbox tab in option bar and tap Rebuild.

Tried, still same results. 

I’ve noticed that Mail can’t find things in searches.  I.e., if you look for email sent to a particular person, it often says that it finds nothing.  But then, if you find the email yourself manually, the message you found shows up in the search.  I knew that I had written multiple times to someone recently, but Mail found only one sent message.  When I found the messages from him, a couple of them had the reply arrows indicating that I had responded.  When I clicked on those, my replies immediately showed up in the search results.  In another instance, Mail was able to suggest a subject that included the word that I was searching on, but could not find the email associated with that title.  Again, when I found it, then Mail was able to find it.  This seems to a bug, and a fairly significant one, since being able to find messages is important.  Any theory on what to do about this other than wait (pray?) for Apple to fix it?

I’ve found that many of the messages can be found if I search for people without allowing the search function to go to FROM, but instead search as if the name were just a word in the message.  This is quite a nuisance, and makes it impossible to search both on a FROM and message content (very useful) but I don’t see much sense in going down the suggested paths.  This is obviously a bug, and Apple will fix it, I assume.

Can other people confirm this bug? Is it new to El Capitan or has it been going on for longer?

I tried many of these suggestions without success, but I finally found something that worked:

- Quit out of Mail

- Go to Apple Menu / System Preferences / Spotlight

- Go to the Search Results tab

- Uncheck Mail & Messages

- Open Mail and search

Pulling the Mail folder into the Privacy window in Spotlight Prefs did not work for me. You might have to do both -- uncheck Mail & Messages and put the Mail folder in the Privacy window.

This was after installing El Capitan on a MacBookAir. Hope that helps!

Search is as problematic as ever.  For example, an inbox search on the last name “farley” as a word yields quite a lot

(though stillnot sure what, if anything, is being left out): 

yet if I select FROM “Steve Farley”, the result is truncated, with everything earlier than yesterday disappearing: