Mail search not working after Big Sur install

I found this on another site and it worked for me.

1. Save your work and close all of your apps

2. Close Mail app

3. Hold the Shift key and open the Mail app

4. Close the Mail app (don't search or perform any other actions)

5. Hold the Shift key and open the Mail app (repeat of Step 3)

6. Close the Mail app (repeat of Step 4)

7. Restart your Mac

8. Open Mail app like you normally would

9. Try searching your mail

Hopefully it's a permanent fix. 🙏🏼 🤞🏼

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

"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.

Hi JLewisH, yes, it does search in sub-mailboxes. Did you try deleting the "envelop" files in the library-mail folder ? they will be recreated automatically, but make sure you have a backup.

Another thing to try is to create another user, setup a mail account and check if the search works as expected. That will tell you if it is a system wide problem or just something wrong with your usual user configuration...

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.

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...

Got on telephone with Apple Support. We found that under Mailboxes All Accounts we Offline ?? Changed to All Accounts On Line and I have been getting all my mail since. I think when my update was installed it turned my Accounts off??

Mail search is a known issue to Apple. It seems to predominantly effect gmail accounts. Try using search ALL mailboxes which seems to be a workaround for now.

Have you installed the latest MacOS version. I believe this is 11.3.1?

This seems to fix many of the Mail search issues some people had.

Removing (and adding) the search box in customize view has helped! Strange thing!

In my list of things to try, the first was rebuilding mailboxes. This has Mail re-download everything from the various mail servers you use. It won't necessarily get everything, especially "remote content" where the mail message has a link to another server to get, say, a picture or something. Back up anything you don't want to lose.

Tried this one out. Indeed. After switching back mail search didn't work anymore.

Disabling indexing/reboot/enabling indexing and it works again. Definitely a bug, since we can recreate the problem with a sequence of steps.

tx

Here is an update on this bug. I spent over an hour with two Apple Tech Support Staffers yesterday. They are puzzled and have shared my computer and gathered diagnostic data to send to the engineers. Last night I thought of a different tactic to try that seemed to work. Instead of restarting my computer, I just logged out of my main user account (the one in which Mail search was not working) and then logged back in. The search function was restored. While this is still a bug it is less annoying and quicker than having to restart my computer each time.

Here is an update on my interaction with Apple Tech Support. About a week and a half ago I was on the phone and sharing my iMac screen with two of them showing what was wrong and trying their suggestions for fixes, including reinstalling BigSur. Nothing worked. They then asked for a capture of diagnostic data (long process) which I sent them. I heard nothing back. Last Saturday I was called by another tech and spent 2 hours with him. Again capturing diagnostic data which the Apple engineers wanted. They seem stumped so far. I also sent them a link to this discussion thread so they would know I am not a crazy user, that there are several of us with this problem. Right now the quickest fix I have found is to log out of the user account that has the Mail Search problem and log right back in. No need to close the software.

That's the problem with all these workarounds. They seem to work but especially for devices with multiple users, they don't last.

Instead of rebooting, try logging out and logging in again (no need to close Mail).

Or, go to Activity Monitor, force quit the process corespotlightd. Then retry search - works every time so far.

Neither option is a permanent fit. However, I won't be trying reinstalling Big Sur, given several reports now that it doesn't work.