None of the search works in Big Sur Mail.app

Hi,

To me Big Sur Mail.app is next to useless as none of the search, nor smart mailbox works at all.

I upgraded then immediately noticed that none of my smart mailbox worked, they displayed a correct (?) number of unread message, but clicking on them, just makes the number disappear, and show no message at all, like if it were empty.

Then I tried searches, I took the eMail address of a colleague and it returned 2 results, after a long "Searching…" message occurred.

I rebuilt my spotlight index, then deleted all envelope files, then rebuild the database. No dice.

I even deleted the whole /Library/Mail folder, and after all my iMap mails were downloaded, still same issue.

I'm using a Google Gsuite email imap account, and an iCloud one, same issue

Posted on Nov 13, 2020 6:38 AM

Top-ranking reply

tomnh

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Mar 19, 2021 10:10 AM

I'm not sure if you have seen the posts but people have figured out its an issue with the process "corespotlightd" and the behavior starts if second (or third...) user has logged in and logged off on this same computer. To get search working again you need to restart this process, rebooting will do this, but an easier way is to open Activity Monitor, then search for this process under CPU, select it and click the X button at the top of the window and select quit. It will immediately restart and search should start working again (until a second user logs off again). This is much easier then rebooting, hope it helps.

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89 replies

Feb 12, 2021 10:14 AM in response to Glitchtracker

ALL other email apps work fine and I will never use Apple Mail app again.

Nov 20, 2020 5:18 AM in response to fellow

I erased all my mail, all the stuff that there's in library, so effectively restarting with a fresh new mail. As I'm in imap, it redownloaded everything, then I deleted the spotlight index and rebuilt it.

=> result : better but so slow that's unusable. Either the search are slow (not to actually search, but the trigering car take several seconds), ether it doesn't work at tall.

Same thing with smart mailbox, to get a result you have to clic and wait for a long time for it to trigger, and then you may get some results, not always.

Bottom line mail is totally broken

Nov 21, 2020 7:50 AM in response to Yigal Arens

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.

Nov 27, 2020 6:35 AM in response to Glitchtracker

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.

arjangch

Level 1

13 points

Nov 30, 2020 8:11 AM in response to Glitchtracker

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.

superjet

Level 1

4 points

Dec 1, 2020 6:58 AM in response to philthehumanist

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.

Dec 1, 2020 11:38 AM in response to superjet

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...

ppson

Level 1

4 points

Dec 7, 2020 7:54 AM in response to Glitchtracker

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?

Dec 8, 2020 11:05 PM in response to Glitchtracker

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.

superjet

Level 1

4 points

Dec 12, 2020 7:42 AM in response to Florian Brey

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.

tomnh

Level 1

4 points

Dec 13, 2020 3:07 PM in response to Glitchtracker

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?

Feb 12, 2021 8:04 AM in response to JessicaFMoore

I have to use my iPhone to search my emails. Ive updated to Big Sur 11.2.1 and email search is still an issue. I'm just in shock how this can be an issue at all but Its apparent that the Mac has been neglected by Apple since they're putting all their efforts on the phone-business.

[Edited by Moderator]

Feb 12, 2021 10:38 AM in response to JessicaFMoore

yes, same here. 11.2.1 seemed to work fine for a moment, until I switched accounts and logged out from the other account on the same machine. By returning to the first account mail search was broken again. Notes also doesn't work. I hadn't noticed yet, because I don't often search in Notes.

Mar 31, 2021 9:08 AM in response to philthehumanist

No, your script deletes the Spotlight index, then Macos will need 15-30 minutes and a lot CPU resources to rebuild the index.

My suggestion is simply killing a process, it restarts the next second and the search works again: it's a 100 times faster than deleting the Spotlight index !

Nov 21, 2020 1:20 PM in response to Skizzwizz

I spoke too soon :-(

Everything was fine yesterday, but overnight Mail reverted to its old behavior. Searching messages is again a never-ending process.

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None of the search works in Big Sur Mail.app