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Since the last Catalina upgrade, I can't seem to use the Search function in Mail anymore. No matter what I type in (address, subject line, etc.), all the search function seems to recognise are mailbox names and the number "found" never changes.
MacBook Air 13", macOS 10.15
An update -- I managed to fix my problem by checking my Spotlight settings. It turns out there was an external drive Spotlight was trying to index. Once I let Spotlight actually finish processing that drive, all my Mail search results started working again!
An update -- I managed to fix my problem by checking my Spotlight settings. It turns out there was an external drive Spotlight was trying to index. Once I let Spotlight actually finish processing that drive, all my Mail search results started working again!
I am having this exact same problem. It doesn't matter what you type in the search box, it will tell you some number of matches found (the number has no connection to reality and doesn't change between searches) but the messages displayed don't change and there are no search results. In other words, the search does nothing useful and this is creating huge problems for me, I use email search multiple times each day.
ditto.
What's even worse is I've found that once I boot into Catalina *and* if another boot volume (like Mojave) is mounted at startup (along with my Catalina boot volume), the attempts to search Mail back on Mojave volume return empty results once Catalina has touched that Mojave boot volume. Complete speculation here but I suspect Catalina is nuking existing data in the Spotlight index on data volumes making that volume's indexed data unusable even back on the macOS version that originally created the Spotlight index. (*)
Fortunately, a work around that's been successful for me is to select individual mail folders in Mail.app and then select 'Mailbox > Rebuild' to rebuild the index of those selected folders. Then searches in Mail will find things again. You will have to do this to all your mail folders in Mail.app (online and local) to get them searchable again. Yes, you could select all of the folders and choose 'Rebuild' but depending on the size of your stored mail folders that could take some time. And unfortunately, there's no end-user visual progress indicator for when each rebuild of a folder is complete.
*- what leads me to believe this is after booting on Catalina *and* another volume is mounted and present in Catalina, if I reboot back into Mojave attempts to then use Spotlight to find something result in the Spotlight window showing rebuild progress bar. Once it finishes rebuilding Spotlight indexes, then data becomes searchable again. Similarly, manually rebuilding mail folders in Mail.app rebuilds indexes allowing searches to work in Mail.app. ( bug #FB7427058 )
Updating to Catalina 15.1 seems to have solved this problem for me (thankfully.) I didn't realize how often I searched my email until I couldn't do it any more.
Problems Searching for Mail in Catalina (version 10.15)
