mail search completely broken in Catalina

Upgraded to Catalina on my MacBook Air 2013 and my Mail search box stopped working. This solution worked for me. Thanks!

Apparently I’m the only one who’s still ******.

so weird solution but it worked!

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.

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.

I had the same issue on my MacBook after upgrading to Catalina. Contacted Apple support who made me Shift+restart mail twice, and then rebooted Catalina. Mail search started working as normal after the reboot.

Hope this helps.

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 !!!!

Same problem here, MacBookPro 15" 2019, macOS Catalina with the supplemental update installed.

Bug happened since I migrated from Mojave to Catalina on day one.

Formatted the disk and have done a complete fresh install, still the bug.

Installed the Supplemental Updated, still the bug.

The only way to have the search back is to reboot the computer.

Could not find a way to trigger the bug for sure, seems every time I close the lid and put the Mac to sleep and reopen it the search does not anymore.

Same here. Nothing I have done helps. I was going to reinstall, but after your experience, I’m not going to. Very frustrating. Some times these weird issues never get resolved. I have an ongoing issue with my monitor screen becoming static upon wake up, going back to 2012.

I had all the problems everyone has stated above and tried a few things this finally fixed it. 

sudo mdutil -i off /
cd /System/Volumes/Data
sudo ls         -----to see .Spotlight dir
sudo rm -rf .Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -i on /
sudo mdutil -E /

In mail app / preferences I unchecked all mail accounts except iCloud then re checked them and left iCould at the top and rebooted mac. THIS FINALLY WORKED

When I type the "sudo rm -rf .Spotlight*" command, I get an error message, saying that the operation is not permitted.

Do you know why I could get this result? There is no additional explanation.

Thank you