big sur mail search impossible slow

It's not fixed.

Look at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252035294?page=15

It seems to happen more to Macs with multiple users, and is 100% reproducible: when one user logs off the other users lose mail search.

Force killing the process 'corespotlightd' will restore the search capabilities.

To test it, try searching with your internet connection turned off (in airplane mode), and make sure Spotlight has indexed your entire hard drive.

Apple's mail search has been dependent on Spotlight indexing all the mailboxes. If your mailboxes are IMAP or Exchange, the fact they are on the server will make those searches really slow. The downside of keeping mail locally on your Mac is you don't have the automatic backup of your mail that most internet providers give you. It is a good practice to have one copy on the server, and one copy on your Mac of the same mail, as long as you keep track of what you are doing.

Apple menu -> System Preferences -> Spotlight lets you control spotlight indexing of the messages on your computer.

So this morning my search was totally unresponsive ... even waiting 5 minutes wasn't doing it.

I closed and reopened Mail with no luck ... The only thing that resolved the search function in Mail was to restart the computer. So something is going on in the background that prevent search for which a restart fix ...

I'll continue the investigation

D

After a long time of having the slow search, it appears to have alleviated. I do have almost 180,000 messages in the mail store, so perhaps it just took several days or a week for Spotlight to finish it's thing. Not sure. Just know that the problem went away on its own somehow and searches are now back to normal response.

During several weeks, I thought that mail search was not working at all after upgrade to BigSur. I discovery recently that it works, but it may take several minutes to find something relevant -- in cases that in previous versions were virtually instantaneous. It is clear that indexing is not working properly. It is a not question of time, since I have my mac switched on 24x7 since the beginning of December). I have made myself look really silly during meetings because I am not able to find relevant info in time Unacceptable.

Since my originally super slow search has now been working speedily for a while now (have no idea why it cleared up; most frustrating) I'm hesitant to now update to 11.2 which may cause the problem to return.

Everyone with the problem should call into AppleCare if you haven't already. You need to get upgraded to a specialist who can take diagnostic info to forward to the developers. The more that do this, the better the chance they will not just put it at the bottom of the queue.

**** right ... I also felt the condescending tone in the last message; I've been a power user on Mac since 1995 (yea, I survived the dreaded os 7-8).

There's something not working with indexing of the emails, it's slow and unreliable. I know that some people are computer illiterate but trust me, I've tried EVERYTHING from deleting old envelope index, restart index in terminal with mdutil to closing mail, reopening it in safe mode, closing it again, reopening in normal mode then restart the computer.

It just doesn't work ...

I have been a Mac user and administrator since the late 80's. Mail search dropped off a cliff after my Big Sur upgrade as well. The upgrade was several weeks ago and my Mac is on 24x7 so reindexing should be done. I thought it was not working, but turns out it takes tens and tens of seconds to respond. I've disabled and re-enabled accounts, I've disabled and reenabled spotlight, and I've recreated the envelope files (all new messages!). Searching used to take a second or two but takes tens of seconds now – that's not right.

I just upgraded to 11.2 and the search function is working, but I'm wondering if it's just because I restarted my computer which usually fix the problem for at least a couple of hours ... I'll report back in 24 hours.

D

I'm finding the same issue. It's not that anything is busy. The activity monitor shows a near idle for all 4 CPU cores on a MacBook Pro. It seems it's just having difficulty searching. I have about 175,000 messages in my archive, but that was never a problem under Catalina.

Dennis and arademaker,

Please start your own topic thread. You can monitor this thread to see if the solution offered resolves your problem. But we don't want to confuse the original poster with solutions that don't apply them. An Etrecheck report will help us identify the source of the issue.

This is a user to user forum with Apple moderation.

Not everyone is finding Mail abnormally slow with Big Sur. There are underlying issues that need to be identified before we can jump to conclusions.