Mail Search not working El Capitan

I’ve noticed that Mail can’t find things in searches. I.e., if you look for email sent to a particular person, it often says that it finds nothing. But then, if you find the email yourself manually, the message you found shows up in the search. I knew that I had written multiple times to someone recently, but Mail found only one sent message. When I found the messages from him, a couple of them had the reply arrows indicating that I had responded. When I clicked on those, my replies immediately showed up in the search results. In another instance, Mail was able to suggest a subject that included the word that I was searching on, but could not find the email associated with that title. Again, when I found it, then Mail was able to find it. This seems to a bug, and a fairly significant one, since being able to find messages is important. Any theory on what to do about this other than wait (pray?) for Apple to fix it?

I’ve found that many of the messages can be found if I search for people without allowing the search function to go to FROM, but instead search as if the name were just a word in the message. This is quite a nuisance, and makes it impossible to search both on a FROM and message content (very useful) but I don’t see much sense in going down the suggested paths. This is obviously a bug, and Apple will fix it, I assume.

Can other people confirm this bug? Is it new to El Capitan or has it been going on for longer?

I tried many of these suggestions without success, but I finally found something that worked:

- Quit out of Mail

- Go to Apple Menu / System Preferences / Spotlight

- Go to the Search Results tab

- Uncheck Mail & Messages

- Open Mail and search

Pulling the Mail folder into the Privacy window in Spotlight Prefs did not work for me. You might have to do both -- uncheck Mail & Messages and put the Mail folder in the Privacy window.

This was after installing El Capitan on a MacBookAir. Hope that helps!

Search is as problematic as ever. For example, an inbox search on the last name “farley” as a word yields quite a lot

(though stillnot sure what, if anything, is being left out):

yet if I select FROM “Steve Farley”, the result is truncated, with everything earlier than yesterday disappearing:

Open terminal from the utilities folder.

Paste this in sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.appsandbox UnrestrictSpotlightContainerScope -bool true

Press return

enter your password.

open mail

Mail search will now be back to normal

Open terminal from the utilities folder.

Paste this in sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.appsandbox UnrestrictSpotlightContainerScope -bool true

Press return

enter your password.

open mail

Mail search will now be back to normal

Hi Matt,

What do yo mean by "sudo defaults"?

Thanks

What helped for me was removing the search box from the toolbar (with the customize toolbar option) close the pane and then reopen and add the default toolbar again.

The problem I had was I could see a mail from info@someaddres.com right in front of me, type in the search box select from and all and it wouldn't appear.

Now it does. :-)

I had this same problem in Mavericks by the way, but then I just moved to google mail whenever i needed to search something. This machine it happened on is brand new and two months old has one mailbox and about 200 mail messages... (the mavericks machine had 10 mailboxes and 100k + messages so I thought it was due to the size)

Bad on Apple...

When the warning came up that system software could be damaged, I chickened out and didn't complete the command. I was hoping the recent OS update would fix it, but alas it did not.

On your solution I will wait until someone with more courage tries it and reports success.

Thanks - looked like a simple solution. I tried it, didn't work.

No solution from Apple on the recent software update to 10.11.2.

the command pasted into the terminal

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.appsandbox UnrestrictSpotlightContainerScope -bool true

Resets a encrypted file and allow spotlight to operate in mail again.

OK - it appears that I am making some progress. My search feature in mail now works, however it only searches my inbox - it will not search for messages in any one of my folders. Is there anywhere that will allow me to configure how mail searches? Thanks

Have you selected all mailboxes?

This option is only available after you start typing into the search bar.

Hi Matt,

Thank you - you are correct! Prior to upgrading to El Capitan, "all mailboxes" was the default for my searches. Thanks so much.

No worries, glad your back to normal.

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