Mail smart mailbox not updating

Honestly I did not try to remove Growl I thought the issue was only with GrowlMail (which I never had to begin with). I will remove Growl and see if it makes a difference. I'll post back after I've had time to observe. Thanks for pointing this out!

Thanks for the comment. Unfortunately I don't have Growl installed. Sorry....should have mentioned that in my post.

In my case, the Smart Mailboxes only work if I open the message. If the message comes to my inbox and it's unread, i.e., not opened, it does not go into the Smart Mailbox. Only when the message is opened does it go in.

Ok 2 days after removing Growl (I never had GrowlMail) the issue is the same. For a day I almost thought it was ok but it's not. @Ronniebel I have something similar in that my smart mailboxes are reading from a different mailbox than my inbox. I have certain mails that are placed there already from the server so that when I open Mail.app they are already there. They do show unread in that mailbox but I have them further sorted using smart mailboxes and they do not show unread there. Seems that if I leave Mail running the new messages come in ok sometimes, but if I shut down Mail for the night and restart the next day the smart mailboxes never get updated properly and I have rebuilt them several times already...

I'm having the same problem on my wife's new MacBook Air which came with Lion. We trashed the Spotlight index in the Terminal and that helps some, but about 10-20% of the time the Smart Mailboxes are not catching mails coming in with that specific criterea. Also, I noted that this problem is also with the searching. When doing specific searches in Mail's search box, the same happens. It's onlhy picking up some of the messages. I'm thinking this has to do with Spotlight. Even though I did the reindexing, there must be something more that's going on.

PS

My wife is a university administrator and she's receiving tons of emails a day that HAVE TO go into Smart Mailboxes. Right now it's a nighmare because some of the messages are not.

Hi,

i have upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion yesterday.

After using a bit mail.app, i've noticed that all my previously set smart mailboxes have now veery few mails/messages...

Has anyone else experienced the same and any suggestion about how to retrieve them back?

Thanks

I am also having this issue. It seems to have only started since the last system update.

I have about 20 smart mail boxes so this is quite an issue for me.

I hope there is a fix or a workaround annouced soon.

The instant I Quit Growl & disabled Growl Mail the messages updated to read.

How annoying.

Oh well, I've deleted Growl. Not worth it really for me anyway.

Reanimating this thread as I found something that cleared it up in my case...

I had a Smart Mailbox which inexplicably refused to update in spite of clear/obvious rules...but each time I went and inspected a specific message that should have been in the SM but was not, I would re-check the SM and those messages (and only those messages) would appear there.

After some experimentation I found that removing the one rule in my SM against "Entire Message" / "Contains" made this behavior go away. I was able to use a rule against the Subject line instead, and suddenly the SM was working as expected.

I suspect this is a bug in Mail.app - perhaps it doesn't index / evaluate entire email messages unless you read them, or some other background process eventually gets to them, which may take time. Somewhat frustrating, but hope this helps others avoid losing as much time as I did on the issue.

It's been a while since I've visitied this problem, but my situation was solved. I was using POP mail in Apple Mail and was moving things from the inbox to other folders (regular and not Smart folders). The Smart Mailboxes only apply to the inbox. That was my problem. I was expecting the messages in the regular folder to go into the Smart Mailboxes, but that wasn't happening and it's not designed to do that. Keep them in the inbox and Smart Mailboxes will work.