Mail search not working after Big Sur install

I found out something today, I am not sure if this changed with Big Sur but I strongly suspect it may have something to do with it.

Problem:

When you search, it only now seems to search whatever mailbox is selected in the left hand panel. This is usually "All inboxes". This seems to ONLY search mail in the inboxes (as it says!). I have several accounts and I have been searching in "All inboxes" for ever and it always used to (before Big Sur) find mail wherever it was. Whether it searches folders in imap accounts, I haven't proved yet. However, it does not seem to search mailboxes "On My Mac" - mail downloaded, via imap or pop, and then moved from the inbox, by rules or manually, to a mailbox on the hard drive. This, of course, is where most of my saved emails reside so they are never found!

Solution:

Luckily, smart mailboxes seem to ignore location unless specified. We need to refer to the predefined smart mailbox All unread which uses the rule "message is unread". (There is no rule for "message is read"!)

I created a smart mailbox called All mailboxes using rule "not in mailbox All Unread" which correctly selected all read messages, from anywhere! Thousands of emails appeared! When this mailbox is selected my searches work fine! You may have to wait several minutes each time you select All mailboxes for the Mail program to refresh the total at the top. Mine took about two minutes to find 29k!

VIPs

VIPs are the same but cannot be fixed by humble users as far as I can see. Apple, you need to fix this!! Mail will only show a VIP's mail if it is in an inbox and has not been moved to another mailbox!! This is not how it used to work and it is now useless.

Follow update to BigSur, I was unable to perform a search in Mail. I followed the above steps (ie quit app, open holding SHIFT key, quit, open holding SHIFT, quit, restart MAC) but unfortunately this did not help. Then I call the Genius bar. While very friendly, this didn't help much either. The Genius recommendation was to re-establish spotlight search, even though there were no problems in carrying out a spotlight search (lengthy process). Finally, I decided to eliminate one-by-one accounts (I have 7 on Mail), starting with my gmail accounts. I was able to do a search in my gmail exchange account after reintroducing the account, but search still did not work in the non-gmail accounts. I have one account that is on Rackspace. I eliminated it and then when I reintroduced this account, I was able to perform a search that worked for all 7 accounts, including those that I had not yet deleted-recreated.

NOTE: make sure to back up on Time Machine before deleting accounts. And only delete IMAP accounts unless you carefully create archive folders on your computer. I had a previous unfortunate experience when I deleted a POP account and was unable to recuperate any of the older messages.

I followed this article https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716 to rebuild my Spotlight Search. In the privacy tab i added my whole hard drive then quit System Preferences then went back in a removed my hard disk from the privacy tab and voila! it worked.

Hi, JLewisH.

Yes, in my experience MAIL would search the mailbox you had "chosen" and all sub-mailboxes..... and seems to do so if the "Spotlight Restart" steps are completed.... at least many seem to have success when doing this (recovery may be temporary but it's simple enough to do again as needed)::

• Open Activity Monitor
• Identify "corespotlightd" process name (it's possible you may have more than one)
• Stop the "corespotlightd" process(es) using x-icon
• 
• Process will re-start and search should work now

Since Apple doesn't track this particular discussion thread, may I suggest that you also report this problem (and your frustration) at https://www.apple.com/feedback/mail.html [select Bug Report from the Feedback Type popup] This is where Apple expects to get Bug Reports.

The Big Sur mail search failure caused by switching users (and possibly other reasons) seems to be a problem with the 'corespotlightd' process. It may be remembering the prior user and not switching internally. I'm able to find this process with the Activity Monitor and force-quit it. It then automatically relaunches, probably by the 'spotlight' process. Once the force-quit and auto-relaunch occurs I'm able to search Apple Mail again without problem. I presume many/all of the other more drastic workarounds are indirectly causing this troublesome MacOS process to also get relaunched -- though no way to be certain. This problem seems to be hanging around too long -- would hope someone from Apple can debug this armed with this apparently small failure domain.

Attached is a screen shot showing my "Include Mail From:" settings. I have three mail servers associated with my account, but I only use two of them. Yesterday, none of them were selected, so I selected them, and search started working. Perhaps you have to have more than one email account set up in System Preferences: Internet Accounts to get the options.

I know you don't want to hear what I'm about to say, but it worked for me.

I re-installed Big Sur by restarting the Mac and holding CMD R until the display shows a progress bar. Then follow the steps to simply re-install. It needs wifi. You may get an error about wifi, just goto the top right corner and choose your network.

My 2019 Mac Air 13" with ssd took 40 minutes to download (it only shows a progress bar but I'm sure it was downloading) and then it needed me to Power it on again. (just check on it, my display went to sleep)

After that it took about 35 minutes and now.... Mail worked within 3 minutes. I could search anything, anybox

It took just over an hour, and tah-dah.

Best Wishes, Warmest regards. (LOL)

Hi,

I had this problem, and I solved doing the following steps:

• Verify if you have contents in the folder …/Library/Mail/Bundles. If you have please delete the contents;
• Make sure on Spotlight:

• Open Terminal Window;
• Run the following commands:

1. 1. sudo mdutil -i off /
   2. sudo mdutil -E /
   3. sudo mdutil -i on /

• This will index everything in MAC, including Mail. After Index Bar finishes, it can take about 24 hours to index is completed, leave the MAC running during the night

Regards

Hi John,

Check this link, you can understand better what the commands do:

https://www.applegazette.com/mac/how-to-rebuild-spotlight-index-manually/

My problem was searching mails before the upgrade to Big Sur, after index was complete, the problem was definitely solved.

This commands won't harm your MAC.

The backup recovery you had to go before the upgrade to Big Sure, and if you upgrade again, the problem could apear again.

I have 2 MAC's, one didn't have problems and other did.

Regards

• killing the process corespotlightd in activity monitor fixes the problem every time, the search will work again. No need to unlog or reboot, this is great !
• let's say you have two users or more, if you log in more than one user and stay logged the search will work for both users. The problem appears when you unlog from one user, then the search for the other user will stop working.
• confirmed it with a brand new user just added for testing, and it happens also... perfectly reproducible
• this is what I see on my iMac, with 11.2, your mileage may vary and I am curious if more users confirm this behaviour

A user in another thread mentioned that "corespotlightd" is the culprit. As a workaround I added the command "killall -9 corespotlightd" to a Stream Deck Key. Works like a charm and should be also working with any other Macro tool of your liking.

Of course Apple needs to fix this issue. Its a major disturbance for many users. Its not affecting just Mail, but other spotlight related searches. Mail may just be the most obvious one.

Thank you Mark, look on page 15 I did the same with a brand new Big Sur system installed on a MacBook that I completed erased first, and I see the same bug.

To be precise, Fast User Switching is when you switch from one user directly to the other user by clicking in the menu bar: in that case the search will continue to work.

What triggers the bug is when you log out of one user and then log in the other user. And if you have only one user on your Mac I believe you never see that bug.

And there are only two ways to recover the search capabilities; reboot, or force kill the 'corespotlightd' process in Activity monitor. Everything else I tried (and trust me I tried everything that is suggested in the 10 discussion threads I am following here) does not fix the problem.

Like you I wish I had never installed Big Sur.

The simple steps are:

• launch the application 'Activity monitor'
• you will see all the processes running on your Mac
• in the search box top right of the window type: 'corespotlightd' without quotes. We are lucky, that search box works !
• click on the process 'corespotlightd' listed, there might be more than one if you have multiple users logged in. Select the one of your user.
• click on the cross button at the top of window, usually the left most, this is used to quit of force quit a process
• a window will appear asking if you really want to do that, click on 'force quit'
• sometimes the process will restart immediately, you barely notice it stopped. It's Ok, no need to do it again.
• check if the search works in Mail. It should work now, if not try again force quitting in Activity monitor. For me it works every single time on first try
• quit 'Activity monitor'
• go to Apple feedback page and file a bug report and tell them how bad they are performing ! https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

APPLEAL, we are far beyond "try search ALL mailboxes", and no, it doesn't predominantly affect gmail accounts !

This bug has been introduced with the original Big Sur, we have tried everything possible (just read the 20 pages), and went as far as trying on a brand new MacBook with only a fresh Big Sur installed and the bug exists also on that minimal configuration.

What we know for sure:

• it happens on Macs with multiple users
• what triggers the bug is one user logging off
• then Mail search does not find anything, and that happens for every other user already logged in
• fast user switching does not trigger the bug
• if you reboot or force kill 'corespotlightd' mail search will work again
• there has been zero feedback from Apple about this, I filed at least 10 bug reports, there are hundreds of messages on this board and no reactions form the 'gurus' you can see on other threads
• what a shame !

I haven't knowingly deleted anything. I did try the procedure shown at the top, deleting something and waiting 24 hours etc. , which did nothing for me. And, I am not a multi-user. I do not switch users.

I do not have anywhere to search apart from "All inboxes". I do not have "on My Mac", other than a header. Hence creating the equivalent "All mail" sorted my problem.

Search now only searches the mailbox, smart or otherwise, that you select. AFAIR, it never used to matter! So, unless you create a smart mailbox to cover mail in all mailboxes, you cannot search "anywhere".

And VIPs are still broken, to me more important than any search.