None of the search works in Big Sur Mail.app

The Catalina fix worked for me and carried on working. However, because of another issue with photos I did a clean reload of Big Sur 11.01.1 and did not import previous settings from Time Machine but began again, simply importing external apps, photos, documents, etc. from Time Machine.

The search function in Mail is still working OK, and very quickly. This in on a 3 month old MacBook Air 13".

I wouldn't recommend a full, clean reload as it's time-consuming, but if people are desperate.....?

Hi, was at my wits end with this. Tried most of the fixes in this thread...None worked for me. Finally gave in and reinstalled Big Sur. Seems to have fixed the search issue in Mail, but indexing is slow.

Well, I may have jumped the gun, but found something interesting. Search seems to work fine until I switch to a different account on the same mac. When I switch back to my admin account the search is then broken again including smart mailboxes. Rebooting seems too get functionality back, but we already have see that behavior...

Maybe this helps some people. Search in mail trying a very dumb AI.

Text search works. ie. "hello there" Because it searches the body of mail.

Search for an email does not work. i.e. "hello@gmail.com" Because mail only searches sender for that email.

Hi, So I attempted a search which didn't work at all, then looked at errors streaming in the console. There are a ton of mail errors with the one below being one of the most numerous, unfortunately, we'll need someone to decode the error.

Curiously, selecting multiple mailboxes in the mailbox list pane works fine: I get a list of all messages in those mailboxes, and can read, delete, move them, etc. However, if I create a "smart mailbox" containing those same multiple mailboxes, nothing shows up in it.

I hope what I'm describing is clear...

Indeed, this is a major problem for those who are experiencing it, making Apple Mail useless for those who have to regularly find earlier messages. I have switched to Spark.

The problem is it’s not clear what about a system causes it. I have a MacBook Pro and an iMac – the laptop is fine, the iMac has the problem.

That's unfortunate. As I wrote I don't really know what fixed it, but all of the sudden it worked. But also read that some people got it to work and then it stopped working again... so we will see.

Have you tried searching for a mail using the general Spotlight search?

I have been having this issue on my MacBook Pro after upgrading to Big Sur. I now just bought a brand MacBook Air. Set it up fresh (not copying, transferring or migrating anything). Exactly the same issue (search only working temporarily if I reboot after opening Mail with shift, but then very quickly reverts again to not working). Easily reproducible.

This is core functionality of an OS that needs to be fixed ASAP as it destroys productivity of the product.

I find that for some reason search does sometimes suddenly start working. Then after a short while it stops again. I have no idea what triggers it. Most of the time it doesn't work, though.

This is crazy.

It is the worst single Apple software problem I have experienced in nearly 20 years of OS X - macOS use. Sometimes - rarely, Mail search with Big Sur on my iMac works. Usually not. Something has gone horribly wrong and Apple is SILENT about this issue affecting a LOT of us. My sense is that the indexing is really broken. Especially for us that have large mailboxes and are storing our mail in the cloud. I wonder if a re-indexing operation with the Big Sur downgrade <sic> is taking insane amounts of time to complete with inconsistent or limited connections to the cloud or if changes in Apple's cloud infrastructure are somehow involved. It's a black box.

I truly do hope 11.1 helps. I tried the steps above and yes, I was able to get search back again, that is until I switch to a different user account. When I switch back to the account in which search was originally working, it now is completely broken. I have replicated this behavior on a 2015 iMac and MacBook pro.

I have this problem too, for both Mail and Notes the search function does not work. ) results come up.

However it started to work yesterday (12/12/20), for some reason. Nothing I did, I assumed it was some sort of indexing issues that took a long time (I installed Big Sur a few days after it was released) and was now resolved.

But now today its not working again. Returns 0 results. What. is going on?

MacOS 11.1 has corrected the fault. I'll let y'all know if the fault returns.

Not encouraging Apple did not respond here with so many others affected.

However, I'm glad it is now working.

Thanks all,

fellow

This is happening to me intermittently and I've found that quitting the Spotlight and corespotlightd processes in the Activity Monitor fixes the issue... until it fails again (hours or days later).

Hope it helps, but I need a more permanent solution.