Deleted SMS text messages found in search

It worked perfectly! Ty!

I just went to settings/general/spotlight search.

Just uncheck whatever you don't want to show up in spotlight.

They are probably still in there, but someone has to go through those same motions to put them back to where they are visible.

Have you accidentally deleted them from your iPhone 5? I did the same thing a couple weeks a go. Here is the solution I found:

If you have back up your text messages, you can restore from the backup.

Look at this tutorial from Apple:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1766

<Link Edited By Host>

@gped Here's the method that i used. it works, but its a pain in the ***. For me it was worth it because they were bunch of texts from my ex :p

From https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4932383

A lot of people have had issues with removing SMS from spotlight search, especially deleted ones. This method should help.

1. Download iFunbox to browse your phone's contents.

2. After connecting device and running iFunbox, click on "Raw file system" in the left pane.

3. Navigate to private/var/mobile/library/spotlight/com.apple.mobilesms

4. Locate the file "smssearchindex.sqlite". Right click it and select "copy to pc" save it where you please.

5. IMPORTANT! MAKE A COPY OF THIS FILE ELSEWHERE IN CASE YOU SCREW UP! I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOU GO DELETING THE WRONG STUFF!!!

6. Download SQLite administrator.

7. Open the file you saved to your computer using SQLite admin (you may need to change the "files of type:" option to "any file" when opening in order to locate it).

8. In the left pane click "ZSPRECORD" then click the Edit Data tab.

9. There should be a drop down menu that says Filterfield. Click to bring up the options.

10. From here you can choose how you want to filter the SMS. If you want to delete everything from a single person , select ZTITLE. If you want to delete individual messages, select ZSUMMARY.

11. In the filter box just to the right of the the drop down menu, type in the name of the person, or the first part of the message to filter your messages.

12. Clicking any of the cells in the spreadsheet of the filtered messages and clicking the minus button (-) right above the drop down menu will delete the message from your spotlight search.

13. Protip: if you are deleting a ton of SMS from a single person, you can click a cell in the spreadsheet of filtered results then click the minus button like normal. Except, if you hold down the return key, you will rapidly delete everything in the filtered spreadsheet.

14. After you've made your adjustments, close SQLite admin. Now just drag and drop your new file back into the same folder using iFunbox and you should be good to go!!

If you found you've made a mistake just replace your new file with the backup file i told you to make earlier and you should be back to square one.

2. Remove Messages from Spotlight Search - Your deleted SMS messages can't appear in a Spotlight search if Spotlight isn't looking for them in the first place. You can control what apps Spotlight searches in and which it ignores, so you can stop it from searching Messages. To do this :

1. From your home screen, tap Settings
2. Tap General
3. Scroll about halfway down the screen and tap Spotlight Search
4. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and tap Messages to uncheck it.

I have this issue, but I'm hoping it means I can recover some messages.

Background: I was out and about trying to send an MMS from the photo album... the phone crashed for whatever reason (black screen followed by automatic restart) and when I checked my message history I discovered all my messages had vanished. When I search using spotlight on the phone I can still see the messages are on the phone, but I can't read them. I have checked the contents of the backup and the messages are indeed there, but when I try to restore from that back up the messages still don't turn up. Very strange.

my experience show no solution for this irritating problem. either you deleted the message selectively or the entire thread, they wont go away. If you do character search, say you key in character "y", all messages contain "y" will be shown in your search result, even if you turn off spotlight search.

My solution is to use messaging apps instead of iphone sms utility, but be careful not to include application search in your spotlight search criteria 😉

message dont die....they remain forever 👿

I can't get this to work on my iphone 3gs with ios 4.3.3

How can i search for deleted sms on an iphone 4 with 4.3.2? Some sms's have not been deleted so the "contact" is still in sms of iphone but I do know some sms's are were deleted using "edit" then "delete". Can i recover these somehow?

Any help appreciated.

On my 3GS I have experienced the same issue, however. I went into Spotlight preferences and unchecked "Messages" then i exited settings and restarted my phone, I then returned to the preferences area of Spotlight and checked the messages box again, the problem was solved. The old messages didn't appear. I hope this helps.

1. Download iPhoneBrowser (Windows)

http://iphonebrowser.googlecode.com/files/SetupiPhoneBrowser.1.93.exe

2. Connect iPhone via USB

3. Start iPhoneBrowser & Delete all files in following 2 folders:

/private/var/mobile/Library/Spotlight/com.apple.MobileSMS/

/private/var/mobile/Library/Spotlight/com.apple.SpotlightTopHits/

4. Restart ur iPhone