Smart mailboxes are empty in Mavericks mail

This is definitely broke. I have had a structure of smart mailboxes that have been working great on Mail for over a year. Now - completely non-functional. One smart mailbox should have about 100 items - it showed only 3. I quit mail, re-index Spotlight, restarted mail. Now it only has 2 - no other changes.

Don't even get me started on the Gmail/All Mail issue. Frustraiting.

For a new OS like this, I'm sure they are. You won't see any response except for the ensuing updates over the next couple of weeks or so.

I have this problem, too, and even went to Time Machine to recover the contents of a mailbox. It seems idiotic but I found if I moved the folder to the top level (some are nested two or three folders down), the messages came back. Of course, now I have a whole bunch of mailboxes to contend with but at least all the messages are there.

To be clear, I didn't actually have empty mailboxes - the messages were listed but the messages themselves were empty (not displaying.

Hope this helps.

YvonneinSonoma

Apple doesn't routinely monitor the discussions.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

Feedback

Interesting. Installed Mavericks on Thursday, Friday my Smart mailboxes were not working at all. Today, after leaving my lappy running for 24 hours they appear to have sorted themselves out. There was a load of activity and updating of the mail system and i'm wondering if smart mailboxes don't work until EVERYTHING has updated fully (including all the updated caching of mail etc). All seems 100% now... so perhaps it's just a case of 'give it time' to get everything sorted. Hope this helps someone.

My MBP has been running continously for 3 days, no activity, still does not work. I tried the add and delete trick, it made no difference, all types of documents are selected too. Even VIP, Flagged, and Unread are empty. I even fixed all the permissions via Disk Utility... No change.

magnum6 wrote:

This is definitely broke. I have had a structure of smart mailboxes that have been working great on Mail for over a year.

By structure, do you mean stored in Smart Mailbox Folders? If so, those folders must be disclosed in order to see the contents. If they are closed in the Mailbox list, and you select them from the Favorites bar, they will not display anything. I filed a bug report on that.

It actually works the same for the Inbox, but the code will open the inbox automatically.

Same problem here, one of my smart mailbox still shows messages deleted from Gmail server and the updating of them (smart mailboxes) is slow and irregular.

Add me to the list. I use many nested smart mailboxes which reference other smart mailboxes and other account mailboxes. They do work, but you have to wait several minutes until the mails get displayed.

So far no solution. Will try to minimize the complecity.

This isn't a generalized problem. I have this problem but my pals, here in the studio, doesn't. I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, they have Mac Book Pro...

Add me to the list. All my smart mailboxes are empty. Rebuilding them from the Mailbox menu does nothing. Re-creating new smart mailboxes with the same rules just makes for new empty smart mailboxes. Very frustrating!

Hello! I found a solution!! Works for me at least.

Could be that library folder was on spotlight exclusion panel (privacy tab) since an old installation of Os X. I had the "library" folder in this panel and when I removed from here smart folders in Mail begin to work perfectly at the moment. The library folder includes mail inbox folders and spotlight don't index the contents (and don't work in mail app)

I hope to that solves most of problems. Luck for everyone!!

I have to rectify. Almost all of the smart folders works. The ones of "last week mails" and "unread" doesn't work fine. The content don't corresponds with the rule of smart folder... but almost all works great.

Thanks for your help Duprez! For some reason my boot drive was listed under the exclusion panel in Spotlight preferences. The mailboxes are slowly coming back. I'm leaving Mail open in the background.

I'm having the same issue. It seems as if the smart mailboxes that are independent of each other are partially working. But any smart mailbox that relies on another smart mailbox is non-functional.