Ive had this happen earlier this year, searching for mails wont find the mails i look for, only trough Finder.
Dont remember how i solved it last time, but i had to rebuild the entire mailbox to fix it.
Why is this happening, and are there other ways to fix it?
OSX 10.12.5
Try rebuilding the mailbox.
If that doesn't work, try re-indexing the mailboxes. This can take awhile if you have a lot of mail.
Reindex messages For El Capitan, try looking in V3. Sierra use V4. High Sierra use V5.
Reindex messages (2) See post by Linc Davis
@Pjdunbar, going back to Outlook will not help. The search function in Apple Mail and Outlook both produce the same empty results, while Spotlight works.
That's really weird. My random file was also 0 bytes and I think it was also dated May 16.
I also double-checked my com.apple.finder.plist and I still only have the one without random letters at the end. It sounds like you somehow got both back again. Maybe try deleting the extra one again?
I don't know about the com.apple.mail.plist but you could try just moving it to your desktop (in case something goes wrong) and then restart the computer and see if things get better. If the new fresh one doesn't fix things, you can still put the old one, I think.
Hope it works!
Search function in Mail not working
