OS X Lion Mail - search feature

I have the same issue. Tryed all kind of stuff and nothing work.

I too find that rebuilding a mailbox causes it to be searchable again. Otherwise any search term (even a single character like e) gives a "No Message Selected" empty view.

Sigh, I have over 1000 mailboxes. This is quite a miss for the Lion upgrade.

Well it not wok for me. What I found interesting is that somehow _spotlight user permissions are gone from my home folder?!? I bet that has something to do with it. Spotlight does not find anything inside my folder.

I have done the rebuilding on my trash and sent folders that have the most emails I need to find.

On a person that I have a 1,000 emails, it found zero before and now 10 that I sent to that person but none from that person. This is in the mail search. In the spotlight search, I am getting ZERO hits.

I have tried everything. I have reinstalled lion and restored with time machine, I have reindexed spotlight, thrown away envelope files, rebuilt mailboxes. I called Apple last week and they told me the engineers are aware that there is a problem and they will get back to me.

Please post if you have found a solution.

At this point, I would like to downgrade to snowleopard. However, I don't think if I erase and then reinstall snowleopard that it will be able to read lion time capsule backup. Please let me know if you have tried or have solution on how to downgrade.

Thanks

Eric

I seem to have found the solution for me.

In the main level library folder in the spotlight folder, I had an importer that was not suppose to be there.

It was related to a program that I use called Mail Tags.

The developler of that program figured it out.

He said it should not be there and must have been put there manually.

I never did that.

I am figuring that with the Lion upgrade it automatically moved around some files incorrectly.

Hope that helps some others.

I have been working on this for a week, including with Apple engineers, who never figured it out.

Good luck to all.

Happy Searching

Eric

I also have found the solutiuon for me 🙂 I had to move everything to a new account and delete the old one. Took an Hour or two but it was worth it.

I too was unable to search my mailboxes with 20.000+ messages after the Lion upgrade.

For each mailbox I choose "Rebuild" from the "Mailbox" menu. You can follow the rebuild process from the "Avtivity" pane from the "Windows" menu.

Everything works just fine now.

Cheers, niels

Rebuilding mailbox index did not help me. I had to remove my mail account from Mail preferences, restart the Mail and re-enter the account info. After that indexing has been working as it should.

In my case I was able to search email entries in spotlight from the finder/search for emails that were stored on my local computer. I had nested folders like Purchases->Computer, rebuilding the "Purchases" did NOT rebuild the subfolder "Computer" - I had to hit ALL folders and then Mailbox->REBUILD.

I am posting just to make sure people know they have to reindex ALL folders using rebuild. Some users have other issues in this thread where spotlight does not see the info at all. The fact that Mail does not know whether your mail is searchable or not is a bug - we should at least have an indication of whether a mailbox is searchable or not in the UI.

My email couldn't search, and I tried everything above. Still didn't work, so I called Apple. They had me do tests, and the last thing they had me do was re-install the OS in place. Still didn't work ;-) So finally I backed everything up using Time Machine, and an external USB and then formatted the old partition and then re-installed the Lion OS from scratch. Now my email works, thank God! Incidently copying from Time Machine proved very slow, so rather I opted to download from the Mac Store, very trick. And with my email now working I can quickly look up all my serial numbers. No problem. So I'm a happy camper again. It took less time to rebuild the machine than all the time I spent trying everything. Though you've got to be very careful about it! I find Time Machine very, very useful for finding that one file or project that I've corrupted accidently.

Can you believe, after I got everything working - I needed one little item in the Time Machine backup. The only way I could get it was to use migration utilities to transfer all my apps and user data back to the OS. Again, the email became corrupted after the transfer. So I had the bright idea to get a virus program... I downloaded MacKeeper 'cause I liked their logo, and yeah!! Email search works again and I'm very happy! It found two critical errors in the OS, so I guess one of them was email...

Lemme sum it up in a butshell. Lion Mail search ***** ***. Terrible. Sorry, Apple. I love ya. But, the new search is truly horrid.

I have the same problem guys, the search in Lion/Mail ***** and ****** me off!

If I do the same search using Mail in the Me website everything's fine.

Besides the virus cleanse, another thing that helped was syncing the email - for what it's worth. Guys, don't whine - Apple could have done better with the email upgrade but you've got to stick with the problem and develop your own solution. Or hand your computer over to an IT expert who can help.

I am having the following issue:

I need to see emails from ALL clients that have the same business name in their email address ie rob@businessname.com, info@businessname.com, rebecca@businessname.com so I don't just want to select one of the email addresses that appear under the People Header. Any advice?