Catalina Spotlight does not find Mail documents

Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes.

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

Sounds like you need to rebuild the Spotlight Index...

How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac

If searching your Mac doesn’t return expected results, rebuilding the Spotlight index might help.

Choose Apple menu () > System Preferences, then click Spotlight.

Click the Privacy tab.

Drag the folder or disk that you want to index again to the list of locations that Spotlight is prevented from searching. Or click the Add (+) button and select the folder or disk to add.

To add an item to the Privacy tab, you must have ownership permissions for that item. To learn about permissions, choose Help from the Finder menu bar, then search for “permissions.”

From the same list of locations, select the folder or disk that you just added. Then click the Remove (–) button to remove it from the list.

Quit System Preferences. Spotlight will reindex the contents of the folder or disk.

Not on Catalina, instead on macOS 14.3. The principle is the same though. One must have Mail & Messages selected in the System Preferences : Spotlight : Search Results categories.

I received an email from Sublime HQ Pty in Australia with a license key for the Sublime Text 4 editor. It is in my emails somewhere, and this simple search from Spotlight external to Apple Mail finds that email in one attempt:

kind:mail sublime



In the Mail application itself, I only need enter sublime in the search field and get immediate results.

If I wanted to see all emails from a person's unique name string (first names may create too many unwanted hits) delivered after (>) Jan 01. Note that received, or date received simply won't work here.

kind:mail from:kantness subject:birthday created:>01/01/2024



I'd do the whole home folder..

Do a Get info on your Home folder, unlock the lock in the Get Info panel. Make sure it says you have Read & Write privileges.

Using the tiny gear icon, use the drop down to "Apply to enclosed items...

If still need be…

Open Terminal and run each of these one at a time

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

sudo /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -lint -r -f -v -dump -domain local -domain system -domain user -domain network

killall Dock

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo mdutil -i on /

Wow David, that's a new one one me.. will require some pondering!

Oh wait, try this then give spotlight time...

Do a Get info on your Home folder, unlock the lock in the Get Info panel. Make sure it says you have Read & Write privileges.

Using the tiny gear icon, use the drop down to "Apply to enclosed items...

Well, the Spotlight Database is different for each user... have you tried VikingOSX's solution?