Mail: Smart Mailboxes stopped working after updating to Ventura 13.2.1

I just upgraded to 13.4 and it appears that both my dual screen screen saver and more importantly to me, the smart mailboxes are again filtering my mail messages. I am not certain it was the new OSX update but I am pleased with my current results. Thanks Apple.

Ventura 13.5 here- I wonder if the problem isn't more specifically about Smart Mailboxes involving date based rules. When I remove logic that involves when a message was received or read, my Smart Mailbox seems to work as expected.

It's completely broken in every way. On top of everything I wrote in my last two posts, the malfunctioning Smart Mailboxes that you do create also just seem to disappear spontaneously after an arbitrary number of days. Hopefully this gets fixed in Sonoma.

I have the same problem since around the same time when I made a Ventura update. I tried all sorts of things that didn't work, so I hoped that an update to Sonoma would fix it - which it didn't.

Even worse than the smart folders not working is that the e-mail search (top right text box) is not working either! Strangely, searching via Spotlight works, but Spotlight is not as accurate as Mail's search.

I really wonder what else to do because the problem also applies to a newly created e-mail account.

Has anyone of you tried to reinstall the whole system? I'm worried that the problem might come back again if it's part of my CCC/TimeMachine backup...

That setting was not active with me, but maybe it helps others. May I ask if you also had problems using Mail's search (top right search box, _not_ Spotlight)? Because so far it seems, people report only non-working smart mailboxes whereas with me, I have non-working smart mailboxes _and_ additionaly a broken e-mail search...

Didn't work for me, but what did work for me was creating a new local user in MacOS, start Mail app and add my existing mail accounts (from Google, Exchange, IMAP) there again. Smart folders worked without any issue.

So it seems that the problem is due to some kind of corruption in the user's folder, but I haven't found out which one it could be. Removing the Mail folder in ~/Library didn't do the trick, it was immediately recreated after starting Mail without having any effect. There must be other locations where Mail saves preferences in the local user folder because even though I had removed all my mail accounts, the favourites and smart folders were still there, even after removing ~/Library/Mail.

I guess/hope that once we find the location of the file(s) where Mail stores these other kind of preferences, that this would help fixing the problem.

Just wanted to add that since last thursday my smart mailboxes have disappeared too except a few that are still in favourites, but no longer clickable. I'm running Ventura 13.6.1. Tried everything mentioned in this thread and still no luck. Apple support no good. Just ended up suggesting going back to an older backup. Wasted hours on this as my smart mailboxes save me loads of time.

I can't believe it, but after updating to MacOS 14.2 today, smart folders are now working again! They correctly show the numbers of all the unread e-mails and the e-mails don't disappear anymore once you go back to the smart folder. Unfortunately, we probably won't ever know what was the problem and why it took so long for them to fix it, but better late than never...

Wow, what a great response! Thanks itsapplemike! I was unable to get any smart mailbox to display properly on apple mail in column view using Sonoma 14.2.1. When clicking on a smart mailbox, it would not display the smart mailbox, but whatever the last non-smart mailbox was you clicked on. Disabling icloud sync fixed the issue.

Oops.. I spoke too soon. Disabling icloud sync also disabled my icloud e-mail account, and re-enabling the icloud e-mail account also messed up the smart mailbox again.

got smart mail boxes working again on SONOMA too btw.

https://droidwin.com/smart-mailbox-not-working-on-macos-ventura-fix/

for Sonoma quit Apple Mail

Open system settings > iCloud Drive > Apps syncing to iCloud Drive > Unchecked Mail

closed, then re-opened mail and it seems smart mail boxes (and mail searches) are working properly again. Not sure how long it will last ... but for now, working again. cheers in case this helps.

This is absolutely still broken, and none of the suggestions work.

Apple needs to fix this.

I can confirm it's not fixed with a boot into Safe Mode because I just did that.

Not sure if you're a bot but regardless: You already pasted in that boilerplate suggestion two days ago.

Two people stated it didn't work.

No, not a bot. Just getting old with bad eyesight. Thought I was in another topic.

I also notice that "rebuild" doesn't seem to do anything. I have the activity window open click on "rebuild" under window and nothing happens.