Mail Search not working El Capitan

Regarding where to find file to delete to manually force a re-indexing of the mail files:

I believe the folder location "V2" (in the above instructions) is not constant across various versions of the Mac OS. For example, in MacOS Sierra, the folder location is "V4" -- not "V2."

Just to say that I did everything suggested here and elsewhere, including re-installing Sierra. Initially nothing seemed to work but perhaps it needs patience for Spotlight to complete. It does work again now (Phew!).

Hey Will Stewart,

what did you do to rebuilt the Spotlight index? The terminal command? I am desperate for a solution for this problem- I also totally rely on Mail being searchable! OMG... what a catastrophe!

Matt, thank you! That solved my non-searching Mail! I'm so grateful to you.

I use Outlook for Mac 2011 on El Capitan, and I cannot use search within Outlook except for emails that have shown up since the issue started 2 weeks ago. Admittedly, my Outlook has way too many emails.

I think I have now almost every suggestion that has appeared related to this topic. Spotlight is working fine.

This is the second time that this has happened, and I cannot figure out what fixed it last time as it was a while ago. Any help is really appreciated. It's definitely hurting my productivity. Thanks.

Just to say that I did everything suggested here and elsewhere, including re-installing Sierra. Initially nothing seemed to work but perhaps it needs patience for Spotlight to complete. It does work again now (Phew!).

But this is now intermittent - this morning a search for a sender worked fine - this afternoon it doesn't (it finds no messages from this user even though there are many - in this kind of emergency sorting by sender would help). The message itself is still present - it just is not indexed.

I do not have a V3 just V2 and V4 folder in ~/library/mail/Vx....

also I am in SIERRA not El Capitan

If the first one worked... why did they proceed to the second? The second solution is ridiculously drastic... the sort of thing only someone with no understanding of the OS X operating system would suggest.

I love you! 🙂

Thank you Matt. This just got me out of a jam. How d'you figure out this stuff?! And why did it suddenly happen?

Best,

John

Reinstall the entire OS because of such a minor issue? This used to be the way issues were resolved on Microsoft Windows, I am disappointed to read this from Apple.