Mail search not working after Big Sur install

I thought it was broken too and I went so far as to completely wipe my SSD and reinstall from scratch. Turns out, mail changed and you might just be searching wrong. Type what you are looking for in the search box and then look on the left where all your folders and mailboxes are listed in the side bar. At the very top there should be an option for All Mailboxes (it only appears after you have typed into the search field). Click on the All Mailboxes option and there are all the emails you are looking for. At least that is how I got it working for me.

After struggling whit this issue for 2+ months, the only solution actually worked for me was to create a new user on my MAC and transfer all the files to it.

Even better, restore the mac to factory settings, create a new user and configure your email accounts from scratch. It's a lot of work and take time, but will solve the search problem for good.

Justy happened to me, and I'm running 11.4. I wish I never upgraded to Big Sur! It's been so unstable. Constantly crashing, and now THIS! I rely on searching my email on a daily, almost hourly, basis.

Do you happen to know if there's a way to stop rebuilding a mailbox once you've begun to rebuild? I had started a rebuild, which means 38,000 messages are being slowly downloaded. I see it in the Activity window in Mail, but I have no idea how to cancel it. Thanks.

This may not solve the issue for everyone, but in my case I found that uninstalling my Sophos Home client largely cleared the problem.

Sophos Home's processes collectively consume a lot of CPU, which in turn seems to interfere with a lot of things, mail search included.

Not a good thing to remove endpoint protection, but my laptop is almost unusable at times. Most apparent is the extreme slowness of mail searches. I hope that Sophos sorts out the issue soon so I can resume using the product.

I have tried everything - I even removed all other users, reinstalled Big Sur, rebuilt spotlight, deleted the envelope files, rebuilt the mailbox, quit and re-opened Mail three times while holding the shift key, plus every other suggestion I can find on the internet. Most fixes work for a search or two, then they stop working again. Unfortunately, the only thing that has worked for me permanently is to install MS Outlook 365 on my Mac and go to that whenever I need to do a search in mail. And I hate MS Outlook. It is a sad, sad, sad day when we have to install a Microsoft program in order to search Apple iCloud email (my email is @me.com) on an Apple MacBook Pro. Really, Apple?!?!? Has it really come to this?

It worked only one time on my iMac late 2015 with Big Sure 11.5.1

When I tried to search a mail a second time, it returned impressively slow...

I tried every thing without success.

Curiously, the same mail searched with spotlight returns a quick result...

No mai searching problem on my airbook, on the same mailboxes (big sur updated)

Thanks this worked. Shame Apple couldn't sort it. It sucks. I've been using a mac for 30 years and the software issues I get now should never never happen. What are they doing releasing updates with so many inherent issues.

I still have issues with Apple Mail - which used to be my favourite programme - and it makes me want to cry.

What is happening with Mail? I keep expecting an an upgrade will surely fix it - but this is dragging on.

Mail on my iPhone works fine - in fact sometimes I need to use my mail on my phone in conjunction with my MacBook Pro to manage it. In other words, when I'm looking for a message and it isn't found in my MBP Mail, I search my phone Mail where I can see the date and time of the message - and then travel to there on my MBP. Frustrating, is all I can say and I'm really disappointed.

What is the phone team doing that the MBP don't yet know about? Or maybe teams have stopped talking together?

I had this problem, with Mail 14, Big Sur 11.5.2. I don't know if I've 'solved' it but it has gone away as a result of one time-consuming but useful step - moving thousands of emails from my main inbox to other mailboxes I've set up. Now that I've done it I can't remember how many emails were in the inbox to begin with but it was certainly more than 9,000 and maybe more than 10,000. Could it be that there's some kind of limit to the number of searchable emails in an inbox, or in any one mailbox? And that one over-full box blocks the others? Sounds unlikely, I know, but as I say, it's working for now. And there were way too many emails in there. It's good to sort them out, deleting the chaff, separating the personal from the business-related, etc.

I tried this method twice, but it didn't help. When I search running Big Sur 11.5.2, I get a couple recent emails but then nothing going back to 2018. Some emails older than that may or may not contain the search terms, but I'm getting no more recent results with thousands of email messages to search through. I also tried Close Mail, Shift-Click, etc., unchecked all but iCloud account, but still nothing changes.

From BigBlue...

SUCCESS!

I cannot find it anymore to give credit, but someone posted some advice which was to right click (control click) on the toolbar and go to customise. In customise you can remove the search textbox by dragging it to the pane of options and it puffs away - then drag it back again.

This seems to be helping a lot of people...

I have only one user on my new macmini and yet mail search is broken.

None of the "easy" fixes you can find on the web seem to work by the way - or at least not permanently (. I haven't tried "corespotlightd" yet though.

Very disapointing indeed.

I’m still having a problem with the email search function since “upgrading” to Big Sur. An Apple Support tech tried a number of different things that did not help and escalated my case to “the engineers” a couple weeks ago. Still no resolution.

So I still can't make mine work. Weirdly it will search messages from a month ago or more, but will not search recent messages. So if I put the name of a colleague who emails me every few days into my search box, it will come up with his emails from prior to September, but no later.

Could this be because I have so many messages in my inbox?

I have tried removing the search box and reinstalling it. So glad this worked for others, but sadly not for me.

I just don't know what to do! I have to look on my iPhone for messages.