Cannot search "Entire Message" content in Snow Leopard

make sure that the mail folder in your homedirectory is not excluded from spotlight searches. check Spotlight's privacy pane in spotlight system preferences. what's there?

My mail had this option available in leopard. However, I just noticed today that this option is greyed out/not available since upgrading to snow leopard. How can I re-enable it? I check in my spotlight preferences, and there is nothing that is not being indexed.

I am having the same issue. "Entire Message" is greyed out and cannot be selected. I checked and nothing is being hidden from indexing.

I even used the mdutil to turn it off and on to make sure that it reset it. That was when "Entire Message" greyed out. Prior it was there but didn't work. Searches were taking forever.

Now they are also taking exceedingly long times when searching in the From/To fields as well.

Thoughts?

Followup...

I had previously had WideMail installed. It should just be disabled in Mail under Snow Leopard. However, I downloaded it again and used the Installer Dmg to Uninstall the program.

"Entire Message" is now selectable again.

However, the performance is horrible. Searching through my Gmail Inbox which only has around 200 messages takes several minutes. The other searches seem to have reasonable performance.

Now honestly... this makes no sense to me. There doesn't seem to be a logical connection between the two. However, those were the steps and that was the result. It seems more likely that something else changed in the background while Mail was down.

Message was edited by: ashealey

Iv got the same problem here turning spotlight on and off for mail didnt work

its a real pain because i use mail search so often!

I'm also experiencing this problem. Nothing is being skipped by spotlight in the privacy pane.

I can confirm that it must be an indexing issue because if I mouseover the "Entire Message" option, I see the popup message:

"Entire Message" search is not available because Spotlight is unable to index /DriveName/Users/UserName/Library/Mail.

Thanks,

Dave

Have you tried repairing permissions to see if perhaps that got put out of kilter in the upgrade?

Yep, did that. Didn't solve the problem. Thanks for the suggestion though.

I did the same and it didn't help.

However, removing wide mail did re-enable the button. Once I did that, letting the system sit for a day or so fixed the issue. I have no idea why... it said it had already completed the indexing. But it's working just fine now and I did nothing other than wait.

Finally fixed it.

I went through the various "Fixing Spotlight" steps here.

After going through all the steps, it worked.

I'm having the exact same problem. Can no longer search Entire Message after upgrading to SL. I'm gonna try the spotlight fixes first...

Thanks for the suggestions. I had the same problem. I didn't need to go through the five "fixing spotlight" steps. The first one worked just fine:

• Launch ‘Activity Monitor’ (located in /Applications/Utilities/)
• Locate the process ‘SystemUIServer’, highlight it, and click the red button “Quit Process”
• Within a few seconds the menubar will rebuild itself and often Spotlight will magically work

Ian Williams' post worked for me.