Ever since updating to Lion the mail search feature is virtually useless. It is ok if I am looking for something from somebody specific that I know who it is but it always comes up with no results from mail older than a week old when I try the 'Message Contains' option and search 'all' mailboxes. Then when I dig back through my mail and find the email, sure enough it contains the text I was searching for. Any guidance?
I know this isnt a fix, but if you use spotlight to search for whatever youre looking for it will come up. The apple mail search is useless. Hopefully they fix it soon
Yes and no. Spotlight does better than mail search, but it still misses a lot of things. (Yes, I've reindexed, rebuilt, etc.) Spotlight still only searches some of my messages. Anything received since the upgrade to Lion is somehow out of Spotlight's spotlight, as it were.
I am having the same problem. Yesterday everything was working ok.
Today, I cannot search anymore my mailboxes.
I tried to rebuid mailbox, envelope index, spotlight index.
Apple needs to look into this and FAST!
Since upgrading to Lion I've been disappointed with the search in Mail search as well. I've got email going back 1998 and use the search daily.
After more searching I found a solution that worked for me.
I selected all the mailbox folders and then went up to the menu and selected Mailbox->Rebuild
After it was done, and had reindexed everything, the search was once again accurate.
One side effect was that in many of the mailboxes, there were now messages that were marked as unread even though they actually had been read. You can either manually read them or you can use the Message->Mark->As Read to get them back to a "read" state.
I've done this "fix" as well ~ and still no luck - glad it worked for you - still hoping for a solution here...
Lion 10.7.2, Mail 5.1 Search Problem
