I am unable to get mail search function to work after Big Sur install. After reading some other previous email search content, I closed mail completely, opened with shift+Mail, closed and rebooted and same problem occurring.
iMac, macOS 10.12
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.
Ah, I would have usually considered the possibility that the icon was hiding off the screen. It will depend on your resolution and hardware.
Another option - and I think it will work regardless of your display settings - is the keyboard shortcut:
Option + Command + F
On my MacBook Pro, this opens up the Search and the other icons move along to create space. However, I can still see all the icons. I suspect that you will be able to too. Let us know on here!
Maybe, I use Office 365 at work but not with Apple Mail.
It does initially search the selected mailbox(es) for me. But I soon as I start typing in the search box, I see the all mailboxes option. I guess you could just select one or more folders, although may not be as convenient.
You could perhaps set up a smart mailbox which you should be able to customise to meet your needs.
Thank you Wayne. That looks like the right place. I've reported on the product feedback > MacOS Mail page.
If others could do similar, that might help prioritise a fix. Strength in numbers and all that :)
I still have the problem after the 11.1 update. Something seems to have gotten better as I have seen SOME searches execute quickly and flawlessly as expected. However, this is very intermittent behavior with no rhyme or reason to when it will or will not happen.. Often after putting in the search information it just hangs and does nothing for a long time if not forever. Way more than 30 seconds I have waited. Probably not more than 90 seconds before I just gave up. I have tried all of the techniques in this thread and none of them seem to resolve on any permanent or consistent basis. Apple, please fix this ASAP!
A factor seems to be whether you have multiple users on your device.
If you don't, various 'solutions' seem to work. However, if you have multiple users, this seems to trigger the issue.
I believe this is part of the reason why certain workarounds appear to work permanently for some people.
Not sure if NevadaGreg (or other commenters) are the sole user of the computer.
I had the problem come up again briefly, but a reboot cured it. FWIW, it only happened on my iMac with multiple users logged in, but not on my MB Air with only me logged in. Also, the iMac is "descended" from a PowerMac 7600 running MacOS X beta and 10.1 via ExPostFacto which had my accumulated data from Systems 7, 8, and 9. That was superseded by a PowerMac G5, which was replaced by a 2010 iMac, which gave way to my current 2018 iMac. Each new machine inherited the prior one's configuration and data via Migration Assistant or whatever. So, there's a lot of cruft there and that may explain some issues, but I still find myself looking for old emails and stuff from way back now and then so a clean install is out of the question. Pretty amazing that things still work.
When it occurred originally, I was getting one result from a search that I knew should have many more. Now that it appears to be fixed, I seem to be getting everything, but I don't have complete confidence since this thread keeps going on with people having issues.
I can't add much technically to this discussion, but I can add my voice to the rising cacophony. A few days after upgrading directly from the latest version of Catalina to m(sic)acOS 11.1, and thinking that it had all gone too smoothly, I found I had the same problem. (For reference, this is on a 2016 27" iMac, which has been restarted several times since the upgrade.)
I have multiple users and have been flitting between them checking that they are all set up correctly after the upgrade. I found that the "__gabe__" suggested fix of quitting and shift-launching Mail a few times, and then restarting the iMac fixed the problem... for now, at least. I also noticed that, after the restart, it took an inordinately long time (-10 minutes) after logging in for the spinning cursor to disappear, the desktop to become active and the login app windows to appear.
FWIW, that was my experience. I'll add to it if all goes sour again.
This solution helped me a bit. Mail in Big Sur is beyond sluggish - at least 1 second minimum to do any action, and often upwards of 8-10 seconds to delete, see content on an opened message, etc. I've run Onyx and cleaned out all the caches, rebuilt the indexes twice, and run this series of commands (note that they should be run as 4 separate commands, with the restart after the first two).
Good find. I've tried that and worked for me. Search in mail was not working but as soon as I quit that process, all is well again (at least for now).
@Gregg R.
I don't use iCloud mail but as soon as I type in the search field, I have the option to select 'all mailboxes' from the left hand pane. And this works as expected. I can also limit to particular folders by selecting 'all inboxes' etc, or a particular folder for a particular mailbox.
[Personal Information Edited by Moderator]
I have twice quit the corespotlightd process (it restarts each time apparently). The first time it seemed to work, but the second time I'm finding that only if I select "search all Mailboxes" that it finds emails in the mailbox I am looking in.
Hey Apple staff, is anyone reading these and working to provide a bug update? Or are we just talking to each other? Please resolve it.
Thank you.
Perhaps if you were an early adopter, and went straight from Catalina to Big Sur 11.0, upgrading to 11.1 might fix it. I hung back however, and then went straight from Catalina to Big Sur 11.1. That's when the problem started, so an upgrade to 11.1 won't fix it for me... and there might be quite a few others like me here.
It must have to do something with multiple accounts on Mac. When I stay signed in using only one of my accounts, after rebuilding the mailboxes it seems to work. But when I sign into the work account it’s time to rebuild the mailboxes and shift+open and quit the app several times and restart. Then it works...for a while. When I sign back to the personal account, sometimes it works, but sometimes I have to go through the workaround again.
I think best way for apple is to scrap this buggy app and start from scratch, deliver new app completely, powered with AI as other email clients do. I tried quite few email clients due to the nature of my work and Apple Mail is in the last third of the list for me. Not really good and friendly product that would fit to 2021 market
Could be that we are a small number of users affected by this issue, so Apple doesn't care. Maybe the bug is not in Mail or Big Sur but because of interaction with something else we have on our Macs. If it was happening on just 10% of even 1% of Macs Cuppertino would have burned by now, so we must have a particular configuration or application creating the problem.
Lets try to find out what we have in common that could brings this, do you guys use something uncommon like:
Could be something totally different, but curious about your configuration JC Laughton as you see the exact same behaviour ss me...
I have tried pretty much every fix on this thread and none of them have helped me. If I kill corespotlightd it continuously respawns. No matter how many times I kill it and Jump to mail i still have broken search. Restarts do not fix it for me, whether mail is left open to be auto started on restart or closed and manually launched after restart. toggling mail and message in spotlight prefs had no result for me. There was random time or two since big sur was installed that mail search worked for a moment and then immediately stopped working.
I hope some of that helps. I just couldn't work like this anymore so got settled in to an alternative mail reader but I am following this thread closely for indications it is safe to return to mail.app.
List of things tried that did not work:
Nothing works.
This problems is ONLY on my iMac. My MacBook, with identical settings and identical accounts on it have no problem with search.
I have noticed that from time to time, at random, it works. But it only works for a single search. If you try to search again ... it just tries and tries and nothing happens.
The broken is on the Apple side.
Mail search not working after Big Sur install
