None of the search works in Big Sur Mail.app

Didn't work at all for me.

This worked perfectly. Thanks Yigal!

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.

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.

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.....?

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?

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.

Same issue here...which isn't helpful at the moment with my current job search!

Same issue, and when you start typing it does not recognize the list of previous senders o destinations, only those names that are in your contacts list

Yeah. Randomly starts working, and then stops again. Crazy.