Mail Search Issues Post Yosemite Upgrade

Question

WigglyWaggly Author

Level 1

10 points

Mail Search Issues Post Yosemite Upgrade

Search does not seem to be working at all for email. Does anyone have a solution?

Thanks

iMac (27-inch Late 2009), OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Oct 21, 2014 4:17 AM

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Answer 1

nick101

Level 5

5,144 points

Oct 21, 2014 4:37 AM in response to WigglyWaggly

Reindex your hard disk - Spotlight probably had a fit. Open System Preferences, go to the Spotlight preference and selct the Privacy tab. Add the disk to that, close preferences. Then reopen and remove the disk from Privacy.

The effect is to force Spotlight to reindex.

Depending on how much data you have to index, this could take a long time

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Answer 2

dpdpdp

Level 1

71 points

Oct 21, 2014 5:42 AM in response to WigglyWaggly

Unfortunately, this looks like a well-known Mavericks bug that has not been fixed in Yosemite. There are a number of temporary solutions that can help for a limited amount of time, but the problem generally comes back in a matter of minutes, hours, or occasionally days:

1. Reindex the hard disk, as nick101 recommends.

2. Reindex just the relevant folders, by opening Terminal and running the command "mdimport ~/Library/Mail/V2"

3. Go to ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/ and delete the files that begin with "Envelope Index" (there should be three of them, plus possibly some undeleted temporary files). Restart Mail and let it reindex

4. On the Mailbox menu in Mail, use "Rebuild" for affected mailboxes.

Other discussions here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6615997

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6612817

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6615526

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6614332

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6604177

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6612780

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6607510

My guess (only a guess) is that this is all the same serious problem left over from Mavericks, and unfixed.

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Answer 3

WigglyWaggly Author

Level 1

10 points

Oct 21, 2014 5:59 AM in response to nick101

Thanks for the suggestion. When I follow those steps it says it will prevent Spotlight from searching those drives/folders. Seems like that is the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish. Is that correct?

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Answer 4

WigglyWaggly Author

Level 1

10 points

Oct 21, 2014 6:13 AM in response to dpdpdp

Thanks. Tried Step 2 above and received the following errors...Suggestions?

mdiLast login: Tue Oct 21 08:47:06 on console

mpJennifeonsiMac3:~ jenniferjohnson$ mdimport ~/Library/Mail/V2

2014-10-21 09:12:40.986 mdimport[638:92803] Error loading /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Office: dlopen(/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Office, 262): no suitable image found. Did find:

/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Office: mach-o, but wrong architecture

2014-10-21 09:12:40.987 mdimport[638:92803] Cannot find function pointer OfficeImporterPluginFactory for factory BFA4E323-1889-11D9-82C8-000A959816BE in CFBundle/CFPlugIn 0x7f95d0637fb0 </Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter> (bundle, not loaded)

(Import.Error:711) Could not create instance for plugIn 'file:///Library/Spotlight/Microsoft%20Office.mdimporter/'

(Import.Error:867) BAD IMPORTER ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ file:///Library/Spotlight/Microsoft%20Office.mdimporter/

2014-10-21 09:12:47.809 mdimport[638:92803] -[__NSArrayM objectForKey:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x7f95d0477400

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Answer 5

dpdpdp

Level 1

71 points

Oct 21, 2014 6:33 AM in response to WigglyWaggly

I've seen that too, and Googled for the Microsoft Office references. There's something off about the Spotlight importer for Word files that's being complained about -- though it also seems to do its job. I suspect it has nothing to do with our problem and can be ignored.

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Answer 6

nick101

Level 5

5,144 points

Oct 21, 2014 7:30 AM in response to WigglyWaggly

That's what should happen. You put them under Privacy, Spotlight stops indexing. You then remove them, and Spotlight destroys the old index and creates a new one.

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Answer 7

WigglyWaggly Author

Level 1

10 points

Oct 21, 2014 8:19 AM in response to nick101

Thanks. Yes, it is still indexing, but finding things. Thanks so much for your help!

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Answer 8

Lukas_P

Level 1

0 points

Oct 22, 2014 2:35 PM in response to WigglyWaggly

Nothing works, I have tried repair disk in safe mode, repair permissions, delete envelope index files, reindex hard disk.

The only way to find the emails is through spotlight and it's very slow, an intolerable bug, I'm really really upset with Apple.

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Answer 9

WigglyWaggly Author

Level 1

10 points

Oct 22, 2014 3:12 PM in response to Lukas_P

Thanks Lukas_P. I have my fingers crossed. The email search is very, very slow and hampering my daily work at this point.

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Answer 10

Oct 22, 2014 5:44 PM in response to WigglyWaggly

Problem resolved by this : On the Mailbox menu in Mail, use "Rebuild" for affected mailboxes

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Answer 11

Lukas_P

Level 1

0 points

Oct 23, 2014 8:20 AM in response to franchard

Franchard, THX the workardound seems to work

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Answer 12

WigglyWaggly Author

Level 1

10 points

Oct 23, 2014 8:34 AM in response to Lukas_P

Luke_P - I tried Franchards solution, however I still am not finding emails that I used to be able to locate using the same search terms. Are you?

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Answer 13

Lukas_P

Level 1

0 points

Oct 23, 2014 12:03 PM in response to WigglyWaggly

WigglyWaggly, also the Rebuild workaround does not work for me 😟, It seemed to work but I was wrong.

Big big problem for me, I receive around 150 work emails per day...

Amazing that a company such Apple may release a major system update with this problem, an email browser is a long dating piece of software and a such a bug is unacceptable.

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Answer 14

Lukas_P

Level 1

0 points

Oct 28, 2014 1:16 AM in response to Lukas_P

problem solved, after three days I was able to delete the envelope files in the trash bin and now everything works

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Answer 15

Dec 7, 2014 2:35 AM in response to franchard

Thks Franchard. Your solution works for me : I don't need to do more than rebuilding the mail box as you said. Now, when I enter search, mail lists all results.

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