Mail search feature not working

shawn from new haven wrote:

I am using OS 10.6.8 ....

You should post your question in the Snow Leopard forum.

I just updated to 10.7.3 and this seems to be fixed. All the things I search for are now being found as expected. What results are other people having with 10.7.3?

I still have this same problem in 10.7.3. It's not consistent. When I search for a string, I'll find some of the places, but not all of them. I can copy the string from the email and paste it into the search box, so it's not like there are invisible characters. I've re-indexed Spotlight. i've archived some old messages to reduce the amount of search.

Any other ideas?

I just installed Lion last week and updated to 10.7.3. I have the same problem in Mail. It really finds nothing. However with Lara_Croft's solution I do find the emails. So you would think the index does work only the search box doesn't.

I do prefer to limit my search to one of these options anyhow.

It also annoyed me in the finder that you could not limit your search.

Found out that you can do the Lara Croft trick there also. I typed name: "any text" <return>

Leo

Screenshot didn't come through somehow

Found out that you can do the Lara Croft trick in the Finder also. I typed name: "any text"

Leo

Without doing anything specific, the search in Mail started working correctly. It took about 3 days.

Anyone want a good laugh? Here is Apple's promo about Mail on OS Lion from:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/mail.html

Search smarter.

Tame your inbox with powerful new search features. Search suggestions help you find messages even if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. Just start typing whatever you remember — a recipient’s name, part of a subject line, a keyword — and Mail dynamically suggests matches. Search tokens let you refine what you find. Say you do a search for John Appleseed. Mail displays a token in the search field. With one click of the token, you can instantly narrow your search results to include just the messages to or from John. Or only the ones where he’s mentioned. You can combine multiple tokens to find the tiniest needle in the biggest haystack.

Too bad the marketing department and software engineering units do not talk to each other.

Thank you Lara_Croft for your solution. It works well for Subject, To, & From. But I cannot get it to work for entire message.

For example: I enter "subject: lid" hit return and the drop down arrow pops up. On the dropdown arrow, I select Subject and Poof! It pulls up 243 emails. Many - but not all - have the word "lid" in the subject line. Though some do not, nor do they have even part of a word that has "lid" in it. So not sure what it is seeing.

Then if I choose "Entire Message" instead of the "subject" - Paaf! Nothing comes up. I chose the word "lid" because I knew someone had just emailed me to let me know he has a lid to a container of mine.

Anyone else have any more solutions?

I wish someone would just circumvent Apple and build an app for searching Mail on Lion. It does not look like Apple is planning to do much about it. Search is also broken on iCal.

I have to take back my comment from Apr. 16th. It still doesn't work correctly. It works on my recent mail, but still not on old mail.

You're welcome. Someone else had suggested doing "Rebuild Mailbox". It helped my searches, but you have to do it for each individual mailbox separately. It is the last menu item under the "Mailbox" menu.

Here is what the Apple HELP system says:

=======>>>>>=========>>>>>

In some cases, you might need to rebuild a mailbox to update the list of messages in the mailbox. For example, you might need to do this if messages appear to be missing or garbled, or if you can’t find all relevant messages when you search using Entire Message. Rebuilding a mailbox can take a while depending on how many messages are in the mailbox.

When you rebuild mailboxes for Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Exchange accounts, locally cached messages and attachments are discarded, and the messages and attachments are downloaded again from the server to your computer. Your mailbox appears empty until the download is complete.

It does help, IME. However, there remain at least three crippling issues:

1. If a sender has multiple email addresses (most people I know do) then it is impossible to search for email from that person except one-by-one through all their possible email addresses. We need a multiple highlight option in the suggestion drop-down.

2. "Entire message" does NOT include the sender part. It should say "Only message body" or something, or be fixed to check the sender part. I'm not sure if it even includes the subject, which IMO definitely includes the subject (and sender).

3. A bunch of the automatic suggestions (e.g. for sender) just turn up nothing. What is the point of suggesting things that are not found at all? What is the point?! If we wanted a machine to pointlessly waste our time, we would have bought a PC.

LaraCroft,

Thanks, that did the trick.

I have a lot of mailbox folders. I selected a whole group and rebuild them in one go. It seemed to work.

I have lots of folders (>1000) and found that doing a large number caused a crash. So I have been selecting folders beginning with a letter or two of the alphabet at a time and rebuilding them. It works BUT I have found it seems to gobble up disk space (~10Gb gone from rebuilding around 1/4 of 30Gb of mail folders). Hypothesis: this is why Apple Lion doesn't rebuild all mail folders by default.

Try this.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mail/4.0/en/14019.html

All very useful to those with the time to try different fixes - but if you're running a business and relied on the simple search functionality it's a disaster. I've been a devotee of Apple and have bought endless systems when running companies for other people adding up to hundreds of machines and software over the years. The joke here is that I updated my OS so I could get an iPhone 4S and now find that I'm being punished for doing so. Why is no one from Apple on this forum ? Why is Apple not taking it seriously ? C'mon guys, you're the most valuable company in the world sitting on billions of cash that you don't know what to invest it in - here's an idea - fix this disastrous backwards development. It's always small signs like this - not caring what inconvenience your putting your most devoted customers through - that mark the turning point where success trips into decline. YOU HAVE TO FIX THIS APPLE and tell everyone. We love Apple because they provide the elegant, effortless solution - to leave it to a bunch of well-meaning but amateur experts to fix this ESSENTIAL functionality is a failure of MANAGEMENT, PERCEPTION and THINKING. It's not in any way consistent with the passion and dedication that has marked Apple in the past. LOADS of my friends are going nuts about this issue. YOU HAVE TO FIX IT!