mail search function not working in MacOS Sonoma

Ralph: Will your process return search capability to System Settings and to Cmd-F "Searching This Mac," as well as to other programs unrelated to mail, which have lost their search functions with the Sonoma upgrade?

In my personal experience all of the search processes came back to life.

It's important to reiterate that the problem was caused by Goodnotes upgrade. The above process solved the problem but it reappeared when I opened Goodnotes again. I have since deleted Goodnotes from my computer and followed the above process again and now all searches are working as designed.

I'm certainly no expert and spent some time searching for solutions to the problem. I tripped over the Goodnotes issue simply because having solved the problem I opened Goodnotes and the problem arose again. From there I found a notation on the web that highlighted the same problem others were having.

All I can suggest is to try the above process and if that doesn't work I'm afraid I can't offer anything sales that might help.

Hello,

I understand that you're experiencing difficulties with the mail search function on MacOS Sonoma, and I appreciate your frustration. I recently encountered a similar issue and found a solution that might help you.

I've detailed the steps I took to resolve this problem in a blog post, and I thought it might be beneficial to share the information with you. You can follow this guide to Fix Mail Doesn't Work with Sonoma.

I hope this proves helpful to you and others experiencing the same issue. If you have any questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask here in the community.

macOS Sonoma I am having trouble with M365 and email search. I have had my new MacBook pro about one week, when I enter a company name or equipment name in search bar on outlook. Search always comes back "No Results" One customer I just received email, I put his name in search and come back "no results" Another issue is Lacie External Hard drive, when I go to export emails to Lacie Hard drive the following appears "OUTLOOK ERROR EXPORTING DATA NO ACCESS TO DIRECTORY". Thanks for your assistance

I have the same problem with the search bar in Mail not working since I upgraded to Sonoma.

Search bar in Notes also not working.

This morning in installed 14.1.2 hoping there would be a bugfix in there.

No, still same problem. [iMac with Apple M1 chip]

This method provided by reddit user ThatsJustSooper worked so far for my mac-mini M2 and macbook pro M1 both running Sonoma 14.1.2

Perform full shutdown/power on

Run as follows in a terminal:

sudo -i

mdutil -Ea

mdutil -ai off

mdutil -ai on

Did not work for me on MBA M2. No method worked until now. I normally get a number of hits (under the search field) but no result shows. If I click in a mailbox without clearing the search field first, Mail hides all messages in that mailbox as if it were showing me a search result. I configured another mailer for now as it is impossible to work without mail search.

I see what you mean. I kinda ran into same issue when helping resolve my friend's MBA M2. It did not work in the first shot. Then I rebooted the computer again and reran the commands. After that , it started rebuilding index. And the search result starting popping up... Not sure exactly which step actually did the trick. YMMV

No luck. I made progress with the log out/log in of iCloud method. This restored search in Calendar for instance, but not in Mail. As it was better I thought that maybe only the Mail index was still wrong and I trashed the infamous envelope folders in Mail data. This brought back the "Import Mail" process which as before failed in the end although I have no disk space or error problem. Someone on reddit advised to disable accounts and import one by one to see if one in particular was failing. Good idea but all failed ! I then went nuclear and killed all my Mail data. I then reconfigured one account and let the server resync and download 30'000 mails and some. And then I tested search in that account and it FAILED.

So I am out of options now. I restored my data from TimeMachine and am back to square one. Not ready for a clean install yet. I have configured another mailer which works but misses some basic functions I need.

[Edited by Moderator]

Not sure if you got this fixed, but signing into iCloud fixed mine immediately.

Very frustrating... I tried several other suggestions because I didn't think simply signing into iCloud would fix it, but it did!

Everytime there is a system upgrade my search in Mail stops working. But I found something that fixes it: https://www.technewstoday.com/apple-mail-search-not-working/ "Reset Apple Mail on Mac."

The 2 things I would like to add are:

1. When he says "Press on Mail when it appears under the Process Name list" he means double click on Mail.

2. I need to restart my Mac at the end of the process and then it all works again!

Same problems as others. For my admin account, Mail search not giving any responses at all. Spotlight giving applications and web searches, but not documents or mail. For another account everything worked fine.

Problem started with new Mac Mini install and move from iMac. Some error message about accounts and strange behaviour.

After trying all the terminal access to stop/start spotlight, spotlight setting changes, safe mode etc the problem remained.

Just tried signing out of iCloud and restarting, and both Mail and Spotlight work. Hope it continues!

Far too messy all round though. Not had issues like this with Microsoft.....

Been having same issue since moving to Sonoma. Last week it actually worked for a couple of days, but that ended again just after the latest update.

I have tried everything as well.

come on Apple do better

And the bad news for me is that signing out of iCloud and signing in again did not continue to work after restarting. Nor does it work now.

Booting is Safe mode still does not help.

I suspect I may have to do a full re-build. My admin account is not behaving quite as it should after some glitch when building first time round. Doesn't always recognise me as an admin which isn't fantastic.

Oh well.....