ios 7 Mail Search Problems

Having this same issue too. So is my wife. It's insanely maddening. We've been so frustrated. Major fail, apple.

Not really a fix, but may be a solution for some. If you go into Settings ....Mail, Contacts, Calendars, switch on Organize By Thread. That should at least remove visually the duplicate entries. You will not be able to delete those emails, unless you click on the found email and that exposes the duplicate entry. This may have well been explained in the thread, but i'm too beat to go through it again.

We are having the same problem in our corporate environment. We have 34 users who all use iphones on iOS 7 with exchange accounts and they have duplicate results in search. We have contacted apple many times and their only answer is that this is expected behavior.

I have the same sorting problem.

I'm running 7.0.4 on an iPhone 4, with twelve total email accounts: one exchange account, one hotmail account, two gmail accounts, and eight custom domains on Google Apps.

My workaround on the gmail and google accounts is Google's mail app, which allows me to search accounts one at a time and get chronologically sorted results.

I'd still love to see Apple fix their problem!

Some time has passed since the last post, but thought I'd share what I have noticed.

I don't really see what this has to do with any particular hosting email service provider.

Anyway, it's 2014 and searching for 'invoice' brought back results from 2013 first, knowing I received an invoice last week.

Scrolling down, I eventually find the invoice I was looking for, received last Wednesday!

While scrolling I noticed the search term, invoice, was highlighted everywhere; furthermore for the early results, the highlight was in the sender's email address eg. invoice@somesupplier.com.

The results that I were expecting all had the search term in the body.

So it seems header-matches get listed first, in chronological order, then email-body-matches listed after but again in chrono order.

Seems like a 2-layered sort or a group-by and order-by kind of database query.

Point is, now I think I know what to expect, search has some usefulness again.

Btw, I don't seem to see any duplicates.

"So it seems header-matches get listed first, in chronological order, then email-body-matches listed after but again in chrono order."

It's actually more complex than that, with flagged matching messages appearing first. We've listed the groupings we've discovered so far somewhere earlier in this thread.

Sometimes the duplicate results don't appear for a while, after all the other results have been displayed.

I installed iOS 7.0.6 today, and it looks the same to me. Hopefully 7.1 will either have separate criteria again, or some way of making it clearer what the groupings are.

Has anyone heard or seen an official response from Apple on this issue? This is a major change in the way that iOS displays search results and it's having a dramatically negative impact on most users. I am puzzled that this major change doesn't appear to be documented anywhere and that Apple has been silent on the issue for so long.

freediverx01 wrote:

Has anyone heard or seen an official response from Apple on this issue? This is a major change in the way that iOS displays search results and it's having a dramatically negative impact on most users. I am puzzled that this major change doesn't appear to be documented anywhere and that Apple has been silent on the issue for so long.

It used to be mentioned in, I think, the iPad or iPhone user manuals, but included some incorrect information and has mostly been removed in the current online versions.

It's also mentioned here in this article about Spotlight search:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3636

From the Home screen, Spotlight searches the sender, recipient, and Subject fields of email messages downloaded from your mail accounts. To search text in the message body, use the search field in Mail. Search in Mail can also search messages on your email server. Spotlight searches local content before it searches for content on your email server.

Depending on the email server (iCloud, Exchange, IMAP, and so on), searchable fields may vary. The maximum number of search results can vary and may be dependent on the query and the email server's search implementation.

The search within Mail also understands dates and message states, so you can target your search based on its date, flag, unread status, and sender or recipient.

Examples:

• Flagged june 2013
  Searches for all flagged messages from june 2013, as well as for messages containing these words
• Unread last week from:@icloud.com
  Searches all unread messages from last week where the sender's email ends with @icloud.com, as well as messages containing these words
• Vip read yesterday
  Searches all read messages from contacts marked as VIPs, as well as messages containing these words
• to:appleseed monday
  Searches all messages sent on Monday to a contact named "Appleseed", or an email address starting with appleseed, as well as messages containing these words

But neither of these mention anything about the grouping, or why the results may appear to be out of order. I don't find the last example reliable, it also lists emails from the address I enter, plus a lot of other results that just don't have anything to do with that address.

I'm having the same problem too. I am so frustrated. I want my searches in chronological order. Every time I try to search for something, I get emails from back in 2008. When I do the same keyword searches in my browser on Gmail I get exactly what I'm looking for. Apple please fix this.

mail search is a disaster, i have written apple on the iphone and ipad feedback sites several times about this

please everyone also do the feedback in addition to posting here

i cannot believe apple has not resolved this issue yet

I agree too.....the grouping is useless and frustrating.....want chronological order brought back and allow us to search by field. Come on Apple!!!

The "new" iOS7 email has been frustrating me for some time. I can't believe they thought taking away functionality (being able to search by field) was something innovative. Add the search result sorting problem on top of it, and I think there are developers at Apple who are operating in left field. I have regained my sanity by getting a new exchange email app called Boxer that actually works the way the old Apple email worked with some improvements. I still maintain my personal POP accounts on Apple's email because Boxer doesn't support POP accounts but it works much better having them separated I've found.

Also some of those Apple search instructions don't work. I have a lot of email from someone named Judy. If I search from:Judy monday I get no results. I believe iPhone thinks it is searching for someone named "Judy Monday." Even if I search Monday from:Judy no results. This is a real mess.

Jon_E wrote:

Also some of those Apple search instructions don't work. I have a lot of email from someone named Judy. If I search from:Judy monday I get no results. I believe iPhone thinks it is searching for someone named "Judy Monday." Even if I search Monday from:Judy no results. This is a real mess.

That doesn't sound right. If I've got any emails from a Judy then that search would return them all, even if they weren't received on a Monday. And if I've got any emails from John Monday, that search would return them too.

If I just search for Monday, it does return emails received on Monday, PLUS emails that mention the word Monday. The latter are listed after the former.

I think one of the big problems is that it returns results that match ANY of the search terms. I.e it's impossible to refine a search.

If you've got emails from Judy and that search string doesn't find them then there must be something funny with her display name. Could that be the case? It's very odd that your search returned no results at all. It should have at least returned emails received on Monday, unless there happen to be none.

In fact, I can see the email from Judy today near the too of my in-box. But whether I search from:Judy from: Judy or from:judyswholeemailaddress, it does not come up. And that is symptomatic of the problem with this search system.