Hi,
It looks like searching in Mail.app is not working correctly for me.
At least not like it was in High Sierra.
Even if I have a message open and search for the sender the search results will not show me the message.
I have tried deleting the Envelope Index files in the Maildata folder and letting Mail re-import the messages.
I have disabled the accounts and redownloaded all messages.
Nothing seems to work.
Any ideas ?
Paul
iMac, iOS 11
Hi Mads,
You need to do this in a Terminal.app window:
Start Terminal.app
Disable spotlight and remove the index by typing: sudo mdutil -i off -E / <return>
This should give a message about indexing being disabled.
Now enable it again by typing: sudo mdutil -i on / <return>
You can check it's enabled by typing : sudo mdutil -s / <return>
That should give a message like:
/:
Indexing enabled.
Now it's just a matter of giving spotlight enough time to rebuild the indexes and when it's done searching in mail.app should work again ( at least for me these steps fixed it).
Paul
Hi Mads,
You need to do this in a Terminal.app window:
Start Terminal.app
Disable spotlight and remove the index by typing: sudo mdutil -i off -E / <return>
This should give a message about indexing being disabled.
Now enable it again by typing: sudo mdutil -i on / <return>
You can check it's enabled by typing : sudo mdutil -s / <return>
That should give a message like:
/:
Indexing enabled.
Now it's just a matter of giving spotlight enough time to rebuild the indexes and when it's done searching in mail.app should work again ( at least for me these steps fixed it).
Paul
Hi
I have tried all off the above , ioncluding rebuiliding ,reinstallig Mojave, removing the envelops from library , in fact i think i have tried everything ....Any suggestions would be really appreciated , also as well as search not working my flagged messages are blank as well as my samrt mailboxes are empty. My flagged messages still are there because when i click show by :flagged they are all there in order but not in the flagged folder on left...
regards
I have also been trying to solve this issue since I upgraded to Mojave, when both Spotlight and Mail searches stopped working. I've tried all the suggestions noted in a number of these fora, and have also been working with AppleCare, who have escalated my case up several levels.
Strangely enough a few days ago Spotlight appears to be working again after having forced a re-indexing about a week prior. However, Mail searches are still not working, and in fact the "Mail & Messages" category of Spotlight seems to only find ones since my last re-indexing began. It is as if no mail messages previous to the re-indexing action are being included in the search.
Any further suggestions would be appreciated...
That did it for me.
Note: After doing step 1 "Disable spotlight and remove the index by typing: sudo mdutil -i off -E / <return>"
It took about 5 min for it to process and me to get my cursor back live in the Terminal window.
Then I proceeded to step 2 (which I think also took a little bit of time? I didn't stick around to watch!)
Thank you!
This fix worked for me as well! Mail, Calendar and Spotlight all use this, all are fixed.
Do you (or anyone) have an idea as to why we had to do this, or what went wrong during this Mojave upgrade? Is there something users are doing wrong, or a bit of a bug or something?
I disabled spotlight and delete the indexes for / using mdutil -i off -E /.
After rexenabling them using mdutil -i on / and waiting for indexing to complete searching is working again.
Paul
Hi Paul
For us with less technical insight, can you elaborate a little on the steps to fix? I am having the same issue.
Br,
Mads
Thanks, this helped a lot. Working now. 😉
Hi
i retried the above methods and it worked perfectly the second time i tried it with terminal.app
I tried this several times. I still get index disabled after typing the code to re-enable.
Why should we have to go through all this. Apple should fix it. It has worked in every other OS X system I have run.ðŸ˜
Having same issue on iPhone- can't search messages
Thanks Paulz42! Worked for me, too!
All is well again in the universe.
Are you sure you're including the "slash" ( / ) at the end of the command?
Be sure you post this to the proper forum; I don't think you'll get much feedback here as this is not an iPhone/iOS forum.
Searching in Mojave Mail.app not working
