Big Sur Mail Search is completely broken, doesn't find anything

[ipearx]

Here you go, a workaround solution:

Big Sur bug: Mail Search (corespotlightd) fails on multi-user machine after a user logs out

Technical fixes, tips and findings -- all based on my personal experience. Mostly macOS and iOS.

tech.kateva.org

To recap:
- This problem occurs if you use fast user switching and log out of another users account. Spotlight search stops working.
- For me both notes and mail stopped searching properly.
- I found logging out of my main account then back in would also solve the problem. But who wants to do that often?!
- The solution given in the link above (i.e. killall -9 corespotlightd) works for me. I made an apple script as suggested, and stuck it in my dock.

 

[Androzani]

So far, this seems to be fixed for me under macOS 11.3.

 

[bladerun1612]

And yes, I've tried most all of the suggested fix I could find.

Who else has this problem (anything and everything I search for now comes up with zero results), and has anyone managed to fix it?

Same problem with Mail and Notes. I tried to rebuild Spotlight, but it didn't work. Also Spotlight searches do not return any result from Mail or Notes. Big Sur 11.2.3

 

[GDMcG]

This appears to be fixed in 11.4. I haven’t had issues with 11.4 yet.

 

[RS1999ent]

Hi - is anyone still having this problem? I am running Mac OS X 11.4 (Big Sur) and I don't use fast-user switching. What's weird is that mac mail won't return search results. But, using spotlight w/cmd-space to find mail works. I have tried all of the voodoo tips suggested in this thread

 

[gwestcott]

1. Save your work and close all of your apps
2. Close Mail app
3. Hold the Shift key and open the Mail app
4. Close the Mail app (don't search or perform any other actions)
5. Hold the Shift key and open the Mail app (repeat of Step 3)
6. Close the Mail app (repeat of Step 4)
7. Restart your Mac
8. Open Mail app like you normally would
9. Try searching your mail

Let us know if this works

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! This worked perfectly!!

 

[Cremastermaster]

None of this is working for me. I cannot search mail at all. I have done a clean install of the OS and it is still not working. When I chatted to support, the guy suggested I delete LIBRARY--METADATA--CORESPOTLIGHT but this has not worked either. The messages come up if I search using Spotlight so this is definitely a MAIL problem. Apparently Mac are aware of it, but I have had 2 software updates in as many days and still it does not work. It is PAINFUL...

 

[nigelbb]

1. Save your work and close all of your apps
2. Close Mail app
3. Hold the Shift key and open the Mail app
4. Close the Mail app (don't search or perform any other actions)
5. Hold the Shift key and open the Mail app (repeat of Step 3)
6. Close the Mail app (repeat of Step 4)
7. Restart your Mac
8. Open Mail app like you normally would
9. Try searching your mail

Let us know if this works

Wow! thank you so much. I'm on MacOS 11.5.2 This fixed my Big Sur buggered up search function. Now it's just as quick & slick & inclusive as it was previously with previous versions. I cannot thank you enough. This should be a sticky!

 

[Cremastermaster]

11.5.2 completely sorted this for me. I now have a fit for purpose Mac again!

 

[nigelbb]

Wow! thank you so much. I'm on MacOS 11.5.2 This fixed my Big Sur buggered up search function. Now it's just as quick & slick & inclusive as it was previously with previous versions. I cannot thank you enough. This should be a sticky!

I spoke too soon. This lasted a couple of minutes then stopped working again. I tried deleting Envelop Index but that made no difference at all. I'm just going to try the whole procedure of starting Mail while holding Shift again again including restarting my MacBook Pro.

 

[nigelbb]

I spoke too soon. This lasted a couple of minutes then stopped working again. I tried deleting Envelop Index but that made no difference at all. I'm just going to try the whole procedure of starting Mail while holding Shift again again including restarting my MacBook Pro.

Bugger! It's completely broken now & doesn't find anything. It doesn't even give the option of To: or From: or Subject: any more.

 

[nigelbb]

Bugger! It's completely broken now & doesn't find anything. It doesn't even give the option of To: or From: or Subject: any more.

Revisiting this a couple of days later it seems that it's sorted itself out. Maybe Spotlight has indexed mail in the background. Fingers crossed that it stays working...

 

[evilzardoz]

Hi all,

Running 10.15.7 still (can't move to Big Sur - UI issues and a few compatibility issues holding me back to Catalina probably for a year or two at this point, not to mention that the Mail.app is relatively unusable vs. Catalina's far more efficient UI). I have tried

• Rebuilding entire Mailbox store by deleting Envelope files (hope that didn't break anything). Didn't fix it.
• Reindexing the entire drive in Spotlight - worked briefly (while it was indexing) but as the index completed, search was able to search less and less. When the index completed, no search results at all.
• Rebuilding individual mailboxes. Worked while the mailbox was being rebuilt but as soon as it completed, it broke.
• Clearing out any additional Spotlight plugins. Reindexed drive. Still no luck.
• The shift+open, close, shift+open, close, reboot, open trick worked very briefly for about 5 minutes and then stopped working.

Most of these steps were executed with frequent reboots.

I have some large data stores - Envelope files sit at around 700MB.

This started when I had to move to a new 16" MacBook Pro from the old one, although I recall it intermittently breaking on the old system.

I've even tried adjusting Spotlight permissions.

Anything else I've missed?

 

[rjheuerm]

Same issue after upgrading to Big Sur (now using 11.6). Mail would find some messages but not all for me, but Spotlight seemed to be working fine. Rebuilding mailboxes and reindexing Spotlight didn't help, nor did the shift-open trick. I noticed that Mail was finding recent messages but not old ones, but if I went back and opened an old message I knew it should be finding, the search function within Mail could then pull it up. So seems to be something broken within the Mail registries that it's just not "seeing" old messages. If this is how your Mail is behaving, the following worked for me (for now -- it's tedious so hopefully it will be a permanent fix):

-create a new folder within Mail
-select an existing folder, select all messages, and drag them into your new temporary folder
-open the Temp folder and drag them back to the original folder
-repeat for all folders you want to be searchable

I ran a few test searches after doing this and I think it's finding everything I expect it to. If you have a lot of folders probably best to just try it on 1 first to see if it works...

 

[bhartman-20]

I just upgraded to BigSur 11.6 and I am having search issues with Mail.
When I search, I cannot search all mailboxes, only the one I am in. Sometimes (It seems random), After a search, I get an option to search all.

Note: I use filtering quite a bit, so there is not a single mailbox that has all my messages... except archive. But I don't want to search to the beginning of time.

Is there a fix or work-around?

 

[nebojsak]

The same occurs for me in 10.14.6. First it was smart folders that dissapeared, and then search got broken. I've installed Spark as an alternative to mess around with a bit, then tried Mail again, and search was working. And then got broken again. So apparently it's not a Big Sur only issue.

 

[evilzardoz]

When you open the "console" app, filter on "corespotlightd", do you see any CaughtMachException error messages when you do a search in Mail?

I've restored a time machine backup to another test machine and wasn't able to reproduce the issue and the major difference was those log messages in the console log app.

 

[evilzardoz]

Update on the previous message: this was verified as a corrupt Spotlight database. I had to disable indexing for all volumes:

mdutil -a -i off /
remove the following:

~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/ (this was 22GB)
/System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight-V100/

Reboot
Then re-enable indexing on all volumes:
mdutil -a -i on /

Then wait for the rebuld, then open Mail and then after a while it stated to work again. So far, so good!

 

[Srichardray]

Hi there... so am a year late to this ... and Im not a technical person. but I thought I would comment because nothing was working in the suggestions above (the ones I tried at least). I then asked for some help from a group called Beyond the Box and they said "Have you clicked on "Rebuild" under mailboxes?" (down the bottom). I walked away for 2 hours and when I came back I could search for everything again. Im also on Big Sur. Hope that helps someone

 

[JW Pepper]

My mail is completely broken I cannot find any emails. I have tried all the suggested fixes and they do not work. I am using 12.0.1 and mail 15.0

This is truly terrible. I don't know if moving to another Mail client will fix the problem. At the moment I use the search finction on my iPhone but it is very slow because it has to look at the server as old emails are not downloaded.

 

[nebojsak]

I've moved to Spark and have no complaints so far. I got tired of battling various Mail.app issues from Mojave onwards.