How to Delete Messages in Spotlight Search History without Resetting or Syncing!!

The answer given by Fre5h is correct. If you jailbreak your phone, this solution WILL work for you as it worked for me.

Disclaimer: check the laws in your area to make sure that jailbreaking is legal where you live. Since I'm in the United States and this does not circumvent any digital rights management, this is a perfectly acceptable solution.

1. Jailbreak your phone. Google it. I use Jailbrea.kr for instructions.

2. Get some software that allows you to browse the files on your device. I used iExplorer by Macroplant. (They have a trial version but I don't know its limitations as I bought mine a long time ago.)

3. Using your software, click ROOT, then navigate to /var/mobile/Library/Spotlight and open the folder "com.apple.MobileSMS".

4. Delete the 3 files contained inside: SMSSearchindex.spotlight, SMSSearchindex.sqlite, and updates.SMSSearch.spotlight. Don't worry; your phone will recreate them later. If you feel the need, save a backup copy of them to your desktop.

5. Reboot your phone.

After spending several hours looking for a solution, this finally worked for me. Again, everything I've said is legal. If I find a solution that does not require jailbreaking, I'll post that too.

I tried this fix and it does not work.

I have read that this is a problem for a long time - years. Me, personally, I do have emails and texts from the past that are private and were deleted, that I do not want my husband or daughter to read. Many people have this complaint and have had it a long time. Why does Apple not fix it?!?

Another privacy issue is the iMessage default settings on new devices. We bought a new iPhone for my college-age daughter and received all of her text messages until we noticed it and told her. We did a temporary fix. Then I got a new iPhone and the same thing happened. I had to set up iCloud accts. for each of us so that we each have privacy that cannot be tampered with. We still share our original iTunes account. Why did that have to happen?!?

We have been Apple consumers (laptops, iPads, iPods, iPhones) for over ten years (? longer w/just desk top) w/ the same account. These breaches in privacy are upsetting!! My point here is that these breaches are unacceptable! The spotlight search issue appears to be unresolved. FIX THIS APPLE!

Claire333- what iphone are you using? I was able to delete by entering the key word, or contact name in the spotlight search and deleting it by hiting the little x to the right. I would repeat the process of entering the word then clicking the x until eventually it was not showing up. Sometimes it took only a few times, while other times it took multiple times. I think it might be related to the size of the cache. I had restored my phone to clear the cache completely and then i tried the above method again (i would test it by sending myself texts and deletling them) It seemed to work with only a few tries (which makes me think it was becasue the cache was not as large)

Thanks for your reply! I can delete them only if they are new. My guess is that somewhere in their code it allows you to clear the cache files before they exist on the phone for a certain amount of time, I just don't know how long that window of opportunity is??

If I backup to iCloud and then do the restore process, will that work or do I need to go through iTunes?

All of my devices were and are set to iCloud backup, but I backed up to iTunes, deleted my account, and restored from iTunes. The deleted emails and the draft emails were gone from Spotlight Search. Afterwards, I tested other emails (old and new) by trashing them, then emptying the trash, and checking SS on my devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod and laptop). They are gone, not there. I no longer have the problem. I just checked again to be sure before replying to you.

I made sure I deleted all emails that I wanted deleted before I started the iTunes backup. A few of the emails were in folders. I trashed them and emptied the trash. Ironically, I used SS to find them.

I am curious to find out if it works for you, and think it will. I got the advice from another poster on another thread. The advice was to use iTunes (not iCloud) to back up and restore so I did. Don't know if it will work using iCloud since I didn't and am not particularly savvy.

I have checked a multitude of times to be sure that not only are the old deleted emails gone, but that newly deleted ones do not show up either. I believe it is solved for me. Hope it will be for you too.

I am wrong above about being rid of all deleted emails in Spotlight Search. I have found some more. Well, that is a temporary fix, but new ones (deleted emails put in the trash & trash emptied) will take their place. I thought that would be the case until Apple comes up w/a fix, and it appears to be so.

Claire333

I was just interested in the text messages. It appears that it does take some time, maybe 1 week, for the messages to index to a cache file, so you can actually delete recently deleted messages from the spotlight search by continously searching for it until it clears (should only take a couple times). Older messages (not sure how old they have to be??) can only be cleared from the cache via full restore

Sorry, I have been working on both emails and text messages. The success I thought I achieved getting rid of both was not true success. Sometimes they would be out of view for some reason, moved around(?), but not truly gone. I give up for now.

My concern has been privacy. My family was sharing an account. I have set up separate iCloud accounts for each person so at least our emails and texts are private now. I guess I will backup, delete, restore to iTunes when I need to. I wonder if Apple considers this a problem that needs a fix?

Regarding continuously searching, I have continuously searched for certain emails and messages in Spotlight Search in the course of checking to see if they were still there in my quest to be rid of them, especially before I had done the restore, and it did not work for me.

There is always the passcode, but that is a pain.

Hey Lee, I did go delete recent texts, then search for them. They did show up the first time, but the second time they did not. I will keep checking. Honestly, to me, it sounded kinda nuts, but it seems to work! I'll continue checking. Thanks.

Lee, That is amazing! Since I did the restore, I could not check very many older-than-a-week texts. I will keep track of the ones I'm deleting now from this week that have not made it to cache. That's pretty good attention to detail on your part. Thanks again!

Glad that technique is working out for you. This is definitely a poor security design by apple in my opinion. Hopefully they will resolve this in the future to allow us to clear the spotlight cache. I haven't really tested it much yet, but I believe if you delete the text messages immediately then it never has a chance to even make it to the spotlight search.

Lee2002 and Claire333, All i did was a "command+space" function which opens a search window for your whole computer, and i typed in the keyword "Chat" and every saved (cached) chat was pulled up. i then just higlighted all of them and deleted them, then deleted the trash can and then i tried to search for the messages in spotlight and they were gone. no need to sync. let me know if that works for you too

If you have mac download iexplorer you can delete the files by opening

-Root

Folders

-Private

-Var

-Moblie

-Library

-Sms

Delete attachment folder(becuase it saves all attachement you thought you delelted)

Then Delete Sms.db

After that Go back to library folder and find Spotlight (delete SMSSearchindex.spotlight)

After i did that all the Txt were erased from spotlight NO HARD RESET NEEDED.

THEN BACK UP YOUR PHONE.

ANNY QUESTIONS

If you have mac download iexplorer you can delete the files by opening

-Root

Folders

-Private

-Var

-Moblie

-Library

-Sms

Delete attachment folder(becuase it saves all attachement you thought you delelted)

Then Delete Sms.db

After that Go back to library folder and find Spotlight (delete SMSSearchindex.spotlight)

After i did that all the Txt were erased from spotlight NO HARD RESET NEEDED.

THEN BACK UP YOUR PHONE.

ANNY QUESTIONS