Mail search not working after Big Sur install

Good Day everyone,

Just wanted to find out or follow up with regards to the Mac Mail Big Sur search issue particularly related to Exchange mail accounts.

Any help with resolving this issue would be appreciated. Thanks

The issue that I am experiencing is with searching for mail particularly with exchange mail accounts.

Is there any fixes yet and also moving messages hangs as well. Only way so far is to rebuild the mailbox.

thanks

Honestly, I haven't tried killing the corespotlightd process yet; restarting the system seems to at least make it go away for awhile., and that's what I did most recently. But next time I see that it's become a problem again, I'm definitely going to try to force kill that process!

Thanks for the reply, but have a look closer, the text typed in Gmail is the same "Dumpboss" without the "s" and because it's A.I. powered it figured out I misspelled the word and offered results for "Dumpsboss". I interacted with this company in December and wouldn't remember the exact name, I only remembered what I thought was the title.

I have similar issues when looking for older emails with documents etc. Apple search seems to only take exact matches...

I got that. I was trying to help you figure out if Mail is not working - or whether you see no results because of the (lack of) AI.

Apple Mail is exact match. But it allows partial search - so for example 'Dump' should find any emails containing that sequence.

Search appears to be working to design. Therefore, your issue seems to be different to that posted by others.

You could suggest added features to Apple. Or use an alternative solution.

It makes me cry - with annoyance as well as not being about to use the programme.

I hate to think I will need to move to Outlook .... but at the moment, I cannot manage without Outlook.

When I search, I can find old messages - but not my most recent message. It is infuriating!

I use a MacBook Pro 15in, 2017

Could someone list the simple steps for “dummies” like me for force quitting corespotlightd. I don’t even know what that is or where to find it to force quit it. Would be really appreciated. Thanks.

Thank you so so much. I had no idea. Are there any unintended consequences from doing the above steps like loss of other data or settings? Or is one free to do it as often as needed? As a note I have reported the problem to Apple both online and through Apple Care. Again thank you for the excellent instructions.

Apple should be monitoring ALL user discussions. That's the only way they can find out how their software is performing in the real world, and ultimately improve it. They have more than enough people in the giant doughnut, and more than enough cash in the bank, to do that.

Well, that is definitely more bad than good news...But thanks for sharing and for your hard work mate. Now I know for sure it was a bad decision to keep updating my Imac with all the trash Apple's putting-out nowadays. It feels more and more like the Microsoft we all used to despise.

Thanks for the input Wayne but I still feel disappointed at the direction Apple seems to be headed with their software updates. in addition to the problems with Mail - that ultimately brought us here - I personally experience a whole host of quirks with Big Sur, and that can be anything from the way Safari performs weirdly sometimes, to the way spotlight behaves, etc...I'm no developer so I really can't say, I can only relay my own experience, which makes me miss more & more, everyday, the previous and apparently more robust versions of old IOS' such as Mountain Lion or Mavericks. Useless innovation, at any cost and for cosmetic & business appeal's sake used to be Microsoft's speciality but I guess I'm just being nostalgic here...:)

Maybe someone who really knows the mail app can tell us how mail search is supposed to work.

If I have a mail box labeled "Overall" and 5 sub mailboxes to that labeled, "one", "two", "three", "four", and "five" and I search "Overall" does the search include the sub-mailboxes (one, two, three, four, five) and give you results from all of them or just "Overall" and only at that level of "Overall." This means you would have to go directly to "One" or "Three" etc., to search them for content.

That is how my mail searches now. I cannot get search results for a whole mailbox and its sub mailboxes but only for one mailbox at a time. I can search All Mailboxes though. And Inbox too. I could have sworn back a while ago you could get search results for a mailbox and all it sub-mailboxes at once.

Is this how it is now? You can't only search one specific mailbox at a time?

Thank you whoever knows the answer.

Good point.

Let it be known that I'm not advocating that Apple can make no mistakes.

Just wanted to make note that Apple is looking for reports of macOS bugs at https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

This is Crazy. It's as if everybody is making excuses for Apple now when they should have addressed this huge problem long ago. I've been using Apple Mail for at least 10 years (probably longer). Search always worked perfectly and globally in mail. You didn't have to specify a mailbox, just type a string and anything remotely matching would come up. If you wanted to search only in a specific or limited space you could, but it was never necessary to specify and it worked through every piece of mail ever touched. Since Big Sur it immediately broke for me. I have tried everything on this thread and more. Killing spotlight processes does not work. I am a single user only setup. Have done ALL trouble shooting anyone on this thread has suggested. None of it improves the situation. Being unable to function without functional mail search I finally ended up biting the bullet and going through the pain of checking out practically ALL other apps for mac mail. I am not naming the app because this is not a plug-post. The app I ended up with took a lot of time to adjust to and was very different than apple mail (way more powerful and more functionality) so I had a tough adjustment curve, but now about six weeks in I am not looking back. Searches execute quickly and flawlessly (with more granular control than Mail App) and everything is working great. I am still following this thread because I am a longtime Apple user and shareholder and I am worried about what's going on here. The is unacceptable. There are people in this thread who spent hours on the phone with Apple tech and they were not able to resolve anything. We are all gritting our teeth and pulling our hair out and killing spotlight and rebooting and logging in and out and deleting envelope indexes and, you name it! The user base is clearly suffering, and working their butts off trying to resolve, Big Sur has had two updates, and not a peep from Apple about resolution. Maybe it's specific to certain machine builds? (for the record I am on a 13" MacBook Pro Retina early 2015 with 16 GB ram) but it seems to be all over the place. I wish you all an end to this madness, but (talking about mail app only, not Apple as a company) when the ship is sinking, at some point you have to get off. I am glad I was able to find a lifeboat (a luxury yacht would be a more apt metaphor) to save me and allow my workflow to continue which largely depends on being able to search and find filed emails. I just hope this poor attention to important details doesn't seep through to the OS entirely. So far all other Big Sur issues I've seen are resolving or can be easily worked around. For any of you on here who have stated "I did XYZ and it is now fixed," can you please elaborate and tell us if the fix is sticking, or has to be brought back with repeated performance of "XYZ"? Good Luck to all and.... FIX IT Apple! ( I know they don't read in here, its been formally reported enough times now that they should be in here trying to learn something, i.e. "we broke it pretty badly!"

Thank you Ganawa. That’s how my search used to work before recent updates. it included all sub mail boxes too but no longer does. I’ll look up how to do a clean reinstall. Scary though. The more I update the worse things get in search mailboxes. Thank you again.