None of the search works in Big Sur Mail.app

Same issue, search fails every time. No results for any search.

Searching by sender, subject, all terms fails to produce even one result. Had to go to web iCloud interface to find messages from this week.

Come on Apple. Where is the excellence?

Problem solved, apparently!

Found this old item about Catalina, tried it, and it worked!

https://www.techradar.com/how-to/macos-catalina-problems-how-to-fix-the-most-common-issues

macOS Catalina breaks search in Mail - here's how to fix it

There are reports that the search function no longer works in the Mail app after installing macOS Catalina.

The first thing to try, if you encounter this problem, is first close Mail completely. Then hold Shift and click on the Mail icon to open it in Safe Mode. Then, close Mail again, then hold Shift and open Mail again.

Finally, close Mail yet again, then reboot your Mac. Open Mail normally, and search should work again.

Happy for you, but the problem remains for a lot of us !

For the ones still affected, more info here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252035294?answerId=254556705022#254556705022

In short, it happens also on a 'like new' Mac with 11.2, with multiple users. When one user logs off, the other users will lose search capabilities in Mail. Incredible but true !

So this fixed it for me (not sure exactly what did it but this is the order I did things).

1. Rebuilt the mailboxes in Mail using the Mailboxes menu, then quit Mail when finished.
2. Excluded my hard drive from Spotlight searches (System Preferences - Spotlight - Integrity).
3. Restarted my computer.
4. Removed the exclusion of my hard drive from the Spotlight settings.
5. Let Spotlight fully reindex before starting Mail (you can check the status by opening the Spotlight search and typing anything).
6. Launched Mail, and search was working.

Hope this helps.

I, too, had to deal with the broken "search" function in Big Sur Apple Mail and it's kept me on my heels over the past few weeks. I ran into the issue on a couple different machines — 2018 i5 Mac Mini and M1 Mac Mini.

I have quite randomly gotten it to work again several times, but it was never clear, which of my actions actually fixed the problem and there's no way of predicting when "search" would stop working again in Apple Mail.

I have tried combinations of deleting envelope files and/or rebuilding spotlight indices. The last round seemed particularly stubborn to my attempts to get it to work again — but I just did, and here's exactly what I did:

1. Quit Mail
2. Go to ~/Library/Mail/V8/MailData and delete every file that contains "envelope" on that level. In my case there were 5 files but I have seen as few as only 3 files having "envelope" part of their file name over the past few weeks when fussing around with this issue. The 5 files I deleted were:
   1. Envelope Index
   2. Envelope Index-shm
   3. Envelope Index-wal
   4. Envelope Index..tmp.xLQXar-shm
   5. Envelope Index..tmp.xLQXar-wal
3. Make sure to empty the trash when done
4. Open System Preferences > Spotlight, go to Privacy, drag and drop the Mail folder (~/Library/Mail) in the "Prevent Spotlight from searching these locations" list
5. Quit System Preferences and restart your machine.
6. After restarting, open Mail — you will be prompted that Mail will import your Mailboxes. I have 223k emails and it took about 5 minutes.
7. After this is complete, open System Preferences > Privacy and remove the Mail folder from the list of items excluded from Spotlight search. This will trigger the spotlight index for the item to be rebuilt.
8. Voila. It worked again and still does.

Hopefully 11.1 will take care of this issue.

Two comments:

1. I imagine this slipped through QC because it does not happen on all Macs all the time. I still have no idea what causes it. I have a MacBook Pro where this never happens and an iMac where it does.
2. Does anyone know whether and how discussions like this even come to Apple’s attention? Is there anything a random user (e. g., me) can do to find out if Apple is aware of this discussion?

Same problem here. Both the mail Search functionality and the "Smart Mailbox" feature is affected. Sometimes the search and/or Smart Mailboxes work after logging in and a quick logout/login helps.

Potential Solution

I noticed, that search results are found again (including Smart Mailboxes) if I rebuild the mailboxes. I cannot yet say how long this will stay ok, but so far it looks good.

1. Select one or multiple mailboxes
2. If you have many mailboxes arranged in folders, option click on the top-level to quickly expand the entire structure and then select as many as you like
3. Use Menu "Mailbox" / "Rebuild"
4. wait
5. Should be ok immediately after mail is done, but quitting/reopening should not harm either.

Thanks to GanawaGangunawa for the hint with corespotlightd.

I would prefer if Apple would actually fix this issue. Its affecting many users in every days activities.

Meanwhile using Stream Deck (or any other macro player) you can build a workaround. Make your tool execute "killall -9 corespotlightd" and you should be up and running again without a reboot.

I have the same issue. Tried rebuilding some mailboxes and reindexing spotlight. No joy. I can open a mailbox, see with my own eyes an email in that box, then ask "search" to find it and it seems unable to do so. Please, Apple, do a bug fix.

Curiously, I have this problem on my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)), but not on my MacBook Pro (more recent, 2019 I think). I tried the same things: rebuilding mailboxes, removing indexes, to no avail.

I am actually running Spark simultaneously all the time, in case I need to search for something – which is often.

Amazing. Go to the top of the class!

It seems to work and although initially slow is now very fast, even though I have many emails stored in many folders on the Mac as well as on the cloud.

Thank you.

Thank you for the Catalina repair process. I can confirm search now works correctly.

I will update this thread if it fails again. And I can share that I did a standard update first and found the fault. After a clean install off boot media, search in Mail.app worked for a short time. In under a day it failed again.

It's clearly a tricky one. I tried the fix 5 days ago and the search function still works, and quickly, so I am pleased. Yet I have another problem, with Photos, following the update, which Apple Support cannot find an answer for.

I have the same issue. Search is not working in Mail (Big Sur 11.0.1) MacBook Pro 16". Did Apple fire all QA teams lately? MacOs is going downhill. It's obvious Apple have moved staff to work on more profitable products and leave the Mac behind.