Search feature in mail finds nothing with Mavericks

This worked for me...

Did not help me.

My ongoing huge issue besides the sometimes bogginess and/or bugginess of the search feature, is the weird disappearance of messages. I have mail messages organized in folders for work, and sometimes inexplicably some will simply vanish. This happened sometime during the day two days ago... all messages in the "sent" folder, a default folder, for an entire week and a half (from about two weeks ago) were simply gone. I needed many of these for work.

Thankfully I was able to restore them from a Time Machine backup... not the latest several backups though, so the vanishing act had happened sometime before those backups had happened.

I have begun to wonder if there is some bug in syncing Mail to iCloud and my iPhone (if I delete a message on one device, it automatically is gone on the other). In this case I had not deleted any of these messages, but I had moved other messages from the Inbox to mailboxes I had created for organizing purposes. This is when the vanishing act most often occurs.

This causes me to not trust my machine. It is very disturbing. I thought it would have been fixed in the latest update, and may have been briefly, but has returned as a very scary bug.

This is a real problem.

A little over a week ago I migrated from an old early 2008 MacBookPro that had Mavericks and was working fine. Since the migration my Mail searches are always met with an error, "No Message Selected." I have tried all the various "fixes" listed in the forums that I can find. I have re-indexed my entire hard drive numerous times. I have re-indexed just the mail. I have removed the Envelope index. I have reset the permissions and rebuilt the mailboxes. Nothing has worked.

Like another commenter, I've been working with Apple computers forever and I've lost count of how many I've bought over the years. I've never had a problem like this. I've always been a fan of Mail but this is so incredibly frustrating that I'm writing on a forum because it's got me wondering if I should just drop Mail for something else.

I've sent in a bug report and I encourage everyone else to as well. Maybe someday they'll fix this....

Hey,

I've tried every possible solution read here and on other places, and I've been really surprised to see that reinstalling Mavericks did the trick ! Not a clean reinstall, the usual one which keeps everything launched from the recovery environment.

I was amongst whose have had issues with restauring from Time Machine.

So you should give it a try !

Problem solved-changed back to outlook. Works great! Very sad that apple cannot fix something this simple! Im getting to the point where Im set up to go cross platform and jump ship to a PC. Its becoming too easy!

Im Sad!

My fix was having my MBP hard drive fail with the click o death. Search works great now on the new hard drive, not using a time machine backup.

This was the solution to me - thank you - very much - indeed 🙂

The reinstall-fix did end my troubles - the search results has come back to both calendar and mail

Recipe of Mavericks reinstallation: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13871?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

FL

That's great, fl3450!

For anyone else: try a clean reinstall of Mavericks. It also did the trick for me. Several months later, the search function is still working! :-))

And if you want to restore all your data in the same process, take a look at my previous post (jan 23, 2014).

I was excited to try this only to find that it didn't fix the problem. Just wasted a few hours.

This worked for me:

sudo mdutil -i on /

Thank you so much, Miska_FL. Your solution worked for me.

Didn't work for me.

Ok, after trying everything under the sun (re-indexing this and that and the other, rebuilding mailboxes, even creating a new user), the fix that worked for me was reinstalling mavericks.

Mail search, Mail VIPs, Calendar search, etc... are all working as they should.

whew.

Reinstalling Mavericks worked for me as well. Reindexing didn't work.