mail search completely broken in Catalina

Do you just have Catalina installed, or do you have Catalina installed with another Mojave volume? In the latter case, it hoses Catalina Mail search, and special steps will need to be taken to get Mail search working correctly on Catalina. If this is the case, I will post those steps.

I'm having the same issue.

I tried rebuilding each mailbox, removing the Envelope Index files (in ~/Library/Mail/MailData), reindexing the volume with Spotlight, erasing the entire Mail folder, and finally disabling/enabling Spotlight.

Nothing worked.

Mail search is still dead in the water, and smart mailboxes and the "Flagged" folder are not responding.

Spotlight doesn't display any Mail results either.

The full reindexing with Spotlight took only a few minutes (it's a brand new laptop with not too many files). I assume this is normal, but is there a delay before it takes effect?

Thanks in advance

2 days have passed and nothing has changed

Tried with rebuild of mailbox and nothing happens.

Tried also with start / stop of spotlight but...no effect

Any other suggestion?

Does Apple is supposed to fix this problem?

Yes, it seems I had called victory a bit too soon. The Gmail trick only worked for a while, and then the issue popped again.

I applied the fix you describe, and once again for an instant I thought it solved it, but after a reboot, the problem came back.

Is there a reason why the attribute is reassigned to the folder? Can it be prevented?

Fabien de Serres -- interesting observation. I quit and and relaunched Mail and indeed the com.apple.quarantine attribute returned, but this time with a different value (previously -1, now 19). However, this no longer interferes with Spotlight search for mail results.

After testing other procedures, this is the only one that worked.

I disabled all my Gmail accounts and restarted the computer. After that, my other IMAP worked fine. Then I enabled the Gmail accounts one by one, testing for each one if the search engine was working. It was.

Almost inmediately, everything went back to how it's supposed to be.

"Crisis" avoided.

Thanks!

Day 3 update: problems are back, the search returns mostly positive results, but also some false positives (messages that don't contain the string of characters). The "flagged" folder doesn't show all the different colors of flags in use.

The odd thing is that I haven't quit Mail or restarted the computer, and yesterday evening everything seemed fine.

The extended attribute com.apple.quarantine was gone (not by itself, but with the xattr command) and is still absent, but for some reason the search is buggy again.

Any insights from anyone?

I was also missing search in Notes in addition to Mail. I did the above steps and waited a whole day. Nothing happened.

However, as some others have suggested here, I shut down and re-started and now search works fine.

This works too, as was mentioned in one of the answer. Disable all email accounts except the one for the iCloud. Restart the Mail app. Search will work now. Just test it. And you can also reactive the inactivated mail accounts. Everything will work fine from then one ...

Unbelievably, and I tried this yesterday and it did not work, I shut down and restarted my Mac and I can again search my mailbox! Which is awesome because I was getting really tired of using alphabetic sort in order to locate mail - which is hopeless if you don't have the name right - for instance ATT or AT&T...

I tried to turn off and on, to reboot indexing via terminal, deactivate account. None of that worked.

Please help us how can we can fix the problem of searching in the mailbox.

I don't use gmail. I am using IMAP server mail. My mails are in the inbox however I am not able to search.

When are you going to support this treat Apple? Clearly there is lot of users that are raging!!!

Hi. Many thanks for that, it worked a treat! I did it by going via Mail>Preferences...Accounts and switching off Gmail there. Rebooted and search was back to business as usual. Flagged emails were also showing properly again in the 'Flagged' mailbox which they weren't before. Switched Gmail back on via the same procedure and all still working fine so far. Now back to mourning the loss of all those useful little 32bit apps that no longer work under Catalina such as CuteFTP & Kinemac grr. (Not to mention Aperture - very sad loss).

I have the same problem too. I can't do search in Mail and Notes. It also does not appear in spotlight. Whenever I restart or reboot my macbook pro 2018, everything works perfectly fine... but not for long. after a few minutes, the problem goes back. I have tried all solutions posted here to no avail. Hope somebody can figure this out. Thank you.

Actually, search works for me in the finder only, but not in the spotlight search bar. Also, if I use a third party utility like Alfred, everything works fine. It seems only to be a problem with the search bar. I posted about this in another post, but have received no replies. I searched the net, but came up with nothing. f

I have the same situation and disabling the SpotLight didn't helped me.

Also I have a situation with the latest VirtualBox it crashes if I switch to MAC OSX desktop.

This Catalina new version destroyed everything I thought that is good in MAC OSX.

STABILITY !!!!