Spotlight & Mac Mail index

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Spotlight & Mac Mail index

Hi I own a Macbook Pro 2017 with Mojave 10.14.6 OS. My mac mail was missing out some mails in search so I rebuilt the spotlight index as well as the mac mail index in the Mailbox - rebuild option, this was like 8 days ago. The index is still getting rebuilt for 8 days now and where maybe i was missing out on 4-5 mails, now over 50% of mails/ files are not showing in mail/ spotlight.

Now I do have a few years worth of mail/ files on this but 8 days is like totally crazy, I even kept the Macbook on all night on power mode yesterday, assuming maybe it wasnt working in the day as I work on the Macbook continuously, no change.

Any suggestions how i can make this work. I am not sure I should be trying to reindex again after the last experience !!

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Oct 20, 2020 6:05 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

BDAqua

Level 10

245,189 points

Oct 20, 2020 9:45 AM in response to uday225

Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode?

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

Open Terminal and run each of these...

sudo mdutil -E /

This basically asks for temporary super user status, which is why Terminal may ask you for your password (it may not if you’ve used a sudo command recently or are already logged in as a super user or root. The command asks the unix tool mdutil to reindex the spotlight database for everything on the computer, including external drives, mounted disk images, etc. To re-index only for a specific drive, use the /Volumes path. For example, for an external drive named “MiniMe,” the command would look like this:

sudo mdutil -i on /

Rebuilding a drive index can take a long time, so be prepared to wait whether you do it through the System Preference panel or the command line.

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