mac OS 27 - Email Search completely broken?

[commanderclif]

There was talk at WWDC of improved search coming to Mac OS 27 but for me (running public beta 3) its been completely broken and was on public beta 2 as well. Ive had to resort to using iCloud.com to go to Mail and search there in order to find what I'm looking for. I either get no hits or extremely poor hits.

Looking to see if others are not getting this to work, maybe its just not "active" in this version of the beta, but if others have it working well I need to figure out how to reset/rebuild the search data base of my email accounts.

For years I had Spotlight turned off cause it just hasn't worked NEARLY as well as using EasyFind to find anything on my computer. At some point I removed the privacy blocks I had applied to Spotlight with Dropbox being the only folder still prevented from being searchable. Under results from app, Mail is turned on but not sure if Spotlight is even part of the built in search within Mail.

 

[benholt]

Beta 3 here on my M2 Ultra Studio, seeing the same thing — search returns three random hits from 2019 when it should be finding dozens of recent messages. Mailbox → Rebuild barely helps in this version because a lot of the search work has moved over to Spotlight/CoreSpotlight and no longer lives in the envelope index.

What got mine limping again: quit Mail entirely, delete the Envelope Index files at ~/Library/Mail/V*/MailData/ (three files, keep everything else), then push your home folder into the Spotlight Privacy list in System Settings, close the pane, reopen it and remove the entry to force a full reindex. Leave it plugged in for a couple of hours. First Mail relaunch after that spins the fans hard while envelopes rebuild on top of the fresh Spotlight index.

 

[commanderclif]

Beta 3 here on my M2 Ultra Studio, seeing the same thing — search returns three random hits from 2019 when it should be finding dozens of recent messages. Mailbox → Rebuild barely helps in this version because a lot of the search work has moved over to Spotlight/CoreSpotlight and no longer lives in the envelope index.

What got mine limping again: quit Mail entirely, delete the Envelope Index files at ~/Library/Mail/V*/MailData/ (three files, keep everything else), then push your home folder into the Spotlight Privacy list in System Settings, close the pane, reopen it and remove the entry to force a full reindex. Leave it plugged in for a couple of hours. First Mail relaunch after that spins the fans hard while envelopes rebuild on top of the fresh Spotlight index.

dannnnng I hoping to wait a while on deleting the envelope files just yet. I had this Exchange bug https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-message-1-of-1-exchange-account-bug.2486007/ (might still be an issue here, been nervous to hit any calendar item replies on my OS 27 beta Mac)
because that was a nightmare to wait on it rebuilding my three email accounts and tens of thousands of emails it said it was downloading again.