Smart mailboxes are empty in Mavericks mail

Whenever I select the two smart mailboxes that are not working, which are the two with the most complicated rules, this type of error is thrown in Console.app. Good catch. I wish I knew what to do about it.

I don't think there's anything to be gained by rebuilding Spotlight if some of your mailboxes work and the big ones don't. It's a bug, and no amount of indexing is going to make those queries work.

Doc,

I have had the same problem for a while too and it was solved by Adam Blainey's reply. I have tried most of the sugestions posted and this is the only thing that has sucsessfully fixed both the smart mailbox issue and the flagged message count.

OnyX can be downloaded here from macupdate.com.

Go to the "Maintinence" tab and selcet the "Rebuild" page. Uncheck all of the boxes except "Spotlight index" and click "Execute".

As soon as OnyX has finished Spotlight will start indexing again. Make sure you don't have any exclusions in the Spolight settings that could prevent acess to mail folders and make sure "Mail & Messages" is ticked on the "Search Results" page.

If this fixes your problem it would be helpful for other users is you mark this or Adam's answer as Solved or Helpful.

Nothing else in this thread or the other threads on this topic worked, but Onyx worked like a charm. Thanks to Adam Blainey, iKotare, and Onyx (which I had forgotten about over the years) for solving the Smart Mailbox problem with Mavericks. Shame on Apple for leaving us to work this out on our own.

Osmiridium wrote:

Shame on Apple for leaving us to work this out on our own.

The article describing how to reindex Spotlight has been there for quite some time: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2409

If you are having problems with search results in OS X, that is the first thing you should try.

Thanks, but as I said... for whatever reason this and the other things mentioned in this thread and in related threads - which I have been monitoring for months and carefully tried several times on several different computers - did not work, but Onyx did.

It doesn't matter how you reindex, you just have to do it.

But that has nothing to do with Apple "leaving us on our own." If your spotlight index is corrupt, you need to fix it.

I have reindexed my spotlight along with other suggestions and nothing has resolved the problem I am having with smart mailboxes.

I booked an appointment with the Genius bar at my local Apple store and they were mystified by the issue. Nothing they tried had any effect. They supposedly reported it up the chain to Apple corporate.

No updates to Mail or OS X have resolved the issue.

Did you check Console.app for errors as was reported earlier in the thread? There appears to be a real issue / bug with Smart Mailboxes with non-simple instructions (i.e. if the query is too long, the smart mailbox crashes and shows nothing).

Hope,

I have found re-indexing as per the kb article linked below rarely works. You need to use OnyX to actually delete the current spotlight index.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2409

MstrE is allso correct that there are uther issues with smart folders relating to massivley long qureys, although i have found that anything below 5 linse is usually ok.

The OnyX fix is mainly for the unread counts being incorrect in smart mailboxes and the flagged folder.

After migrating my info from my other computer to the new macbook pro with mavericks, my mail was working fine except I noticed that none of my smart mailboxes were populated. I chose to rebuild my mailbox....(mailbox>rebuild) from the menu. Then once again all were populated. Seems all too simple I know but maybe this will help someone.

I have been having problems with a couple of Smart Mailboxes not showing all the messages it should - for example one of them is looking at 4 different folders - 2 "On My Mac" and 2 IMAP mailboxes on AOL.com to see if "Message is in Mailbox" and should list the contents of those 4 messages in a single Smart Mailbox.

It gets messages from 3 of those boxes, but not the 4th - an IMAP mailbox from AOL.com. I know the messages are there since I see them when looking at the IMAP mailbox both through Mail, and through Safari.

The other is a trial Smart Mailbox I made that is looking at just the single IMAP mailbox to get the messages in it - this shows no contents at all.

I came across this thread while searching for anwers, and in particular your reply about the length of messages in Console concerning the length of the query string.

For me that error message is 355,797 characters and contains 2,344 occurrences of "!=", so well past your limit of 1,204. The messages in Console seem to be about excluding mailboxes that are in Trash

At the moment SpotLight is rebuilding after I used Onyx to delete the SpotLight Index - I don't know if this will also cure another odd situation I've had for a while - whenever I restart my Mac Pro, SpotLight gets rebuilt which as far as I know is new since I installed Mavericks a few weeks ago.

Roger

I think this might be what you're all looking for http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14876

Hey percy161,

I tried that out and I have to say my Smart Mailboxes are so far very snappy. I have several accounts and some 100,00+ messages too, so it took a while to rebuild the index, but it's quite pleasureable once again.

Thanks

That worked for me!