Mail search not working after Big Sur install

Others have reported that intractability, too. I've not experienced it myself but I did have the original search problem.

I'd suggest adding this "will not search subcategories" to the Apple Bug Report.

I Keep getting this issue in 11.2.2 and 11.2.3.

I found the suggestions in forums to 1. Quit mail app, 2. Open holding shift a few times, then 3. rebooting. It works but the issue re-appears after few hours. Is there a permanent fix available rather rebooting overtime.

For those whose Mail is now searching: Can you search all sub mailboxes under a heading mail box? Example: You have a mail box titled "Dogs". Under that mailbox you have "Boxer" and "Poodle" and " Great Dane". If you select "Dogs" in your search (say for the word "bone") does it search for the term both in the main heading "Dogs" and the subfolders "Boxer," "Poodle," and "Great Dane"all at once as it used in earlier versions of the software? Mine only searches "Dogs" not the subfolders as it used to. Mine only searches the exact folder selected, no subfolders. `

Wow. Good for you. I cannot do it to save my life. Will only search one mailbox at a time or it does work in All Mailboxes but that's too extensive to be useful, not narrow enough. Glad yours works.

In addition (I think) I have a functionality issue - you can no longer search all Mailboxes at once. Now it ONLY searches current mailbox. You also can no longer filter mail (unless you only ever want to filter by unread - no other options exist)

This feels less like a glitch and more like a choice to make Mail much much worse.

I depend on my email for work. I've called Apple support five times about this. Each rep has me "try" different things (as if I am a beta tester for their Big Sur software). One rep had me "rebuild" my mail. Others had me restart the computer, etc, etc. One told me that the mail search uses a new "algorithm" that isn't as good. I use both mac mail and google mail in my mac mail account. Some techs have tried to blame Google. Google is not an obscure email.

How can Apple release these new softwares without making sure they work together will established software like Gmail? Today I was told I have to wait until Apple releases a new 11.2.4.

Seriously. I miss the days when Apple products were impressive and well functioning. It's what helped them to overtake PC's. Now I am not so sure.

I feel your pain. I couldn't take it anymore. I bought the App Postbox for 50 bucks. It took me a bit of time to adjust but now, after several months, I am never looking back or missing apple mail at all. It's absurd that they shipped an OS that breaks mail's usefulness SEVERELY. Try postbox. I have no affiliation with them other than that their app restored my sanity.

Now that I'm looking more carefully it's much much worse than I thought. For every email more than 3 years old (not IMAP, these are the ones in ON MY MAC folders), the content is gone. It is just a bunch of email headers.

I run a business off of my macs. So many of my records have just vanished. important records. I thought it was just that I couldn't search them, but maybe the search is fine, they just deleted all the content I thought I was searching through. This is inexcusable. And has the potential to cost me thousands of dollars!!!!!!!!!

Here's what worked for me:

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

Lately I spend all my precious work time trying to fix my mac can I bill apple for this?

Had the disappearing mail problem transferring junk to inbox - deleted all accounts and reinstalled to fix

Now search won't find things that I know are in my mailbox.

Finally fixed by reindexing Spotlight Restart Spotlight https://www.macobserver.com/tips/how-to/fixing-broken-mail-search-

macos/

Seriously can't Apple make a stable operating system anymore - this is why I switched from Microsoft - might have to go back.

Each update seems to get worse and worse

This link explains how to make a AppleScript to automate restarting corespotlightd. Problem seems to be related to fast user switching (at least that's how the problem crops up for me!)

https://tech.kateva.org/2021/02/big-sur-bug-mail-search-corespotlightd.html

"Stop the 'corespotlightd' process(es) using x-icon": one of the steps for the STOP/START process to return functionality of MAIL Search.

The "x-icon" refers to the STOP control at the top of the Activity Monitor window:

Sorry for the confusion.

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.

Good news everyone !

I have just installed 11.3, and now search in Mail returns the expected results as it should, even after logging off another user.

I was able to reproduce this bug since November, and no update to 11.2 corrected it. It took 6 months of pain and working around this nasty bug, I still can't believe it took that long.

For reference, the problem I had (and numerous other users) happened on a multi-user Mac: with multiple users logged in, as soon as one user would log off, Mais search for all the others stopped working and did not return results. Fast switching between users did not trigger that bug. The quick cure was to kill the process corespotlightd in activity monitor, there are several posts in this discussion detailing how to do that.

This is a quick fast post to give hope to all users affected by this bug, let's see if it keeps working all along my workday !😬

I have updated to 11.3 with no change in this: If I search a mailbox it only searches that mailbox and not the sub-mailboxes under it. Is search supposed to search all sub-mailboxes under a main mailbox? I am sure it used to. Anybody who really knows Mail do let me know. I'm a single user.