“Entire Message” searches blank?
For a few days I have been having occasional problems with Spotlight-powered searches in Mail.app.
A search in “All Mailboxes” for a word in the “Entire Message” suddenly produces no results, although To, From or Subject searches which are drawn from Mail’s own SQLite database (see What’s in your Mail folder for more info) work fine.
The fix for this is simple. You need to force a reindex of Spotlight.
You can do this by typing some text 
into the terminal, by following the instructions in an Apple technote , or using a handly little app called Spotless .
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Tags: Apple Mail Tips, apple mail. Spotlight, mail.app, reindexing, searches
May 9th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
Deleting the “Envelope Index” in ~/Library/Mail will normally do the trick as well.
Just be sure to make a backup first!
May 10th, 2006 at 12:13 am
Hi Tauquil. I’m surprised to hear this, as the Envelope Index is actually the SQLite database that indexes data from the To, From and Subject fields, and is not related to, or used by, Spotlight at all.
Are you sure about that?
May 10th, 2006 at 2:11 am
When I transferred my data from my PB to my MBP (using Migration Assistant) my Mail searches were turning up blank results. Moving the Envelope Index to the desktop and restarting Mail seemed to fix the problem.
Could have been a fluke!
May 10th, 2006 at 8:35 am
I can see how that would fix faulty searches for senders, recipients and subjects, but I am surprised about it fixing the full text search. I’ll have to rethink what I thought I knew. :)
May 20th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
I’ve got the same exact problem. I reindexed Spotlight, moved the Envelope Index to the desktop and restarted Mail, no luck. The Subject search works fine (in Mail and Spotlight), but the Entire Message option comes up blank. It’s tragic.
June 11th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
I actually never had this problem until I tried to use Spotless to prevent indexing of my firewire backup drive. Now I have the problem and reindexing does not help. There is something involving Mail.app itself.
Anyone have this experience?
January 12th, 2009 at 9:56 am
I’ve had the problem repeatedly. Tried a lot of solutions that worked for some others, not all. Best solution for me was to reinstall (archive and install) the OS… Leopard, in my case. Reindexing does not need to bbe redone after installation, apparently, but Spotlight and Mail search in Entire Message for various mailboxes works again instantly.
Problem reoccurred again. But I got back Entire Messasge search for All Mailboxes but not specific individual ones. That’s kind of OK because you can sort result by mailbox anyway. I got the Entire Message search back (in All Mailboxes), apparently, by allowing, again, Spotlight to index my main full backup drive (Time Machine not in use)
From what I’ve read here and elsewhere I think the problem may sometimes, at least, be due to other external drives with Mail on it, like backup drives — and trying to get Spotlight to NOT index the backup drives. I did that with my backup drives (SuperDuper backup). I had excluded the backup drive in Spotlight’s Privacy setting. Now, I changed that back so the backup drive was NOT excluded and let Spotlight index the drive again. Took a long while, but did get back search results in Entire Message, All Mailboxes.
Good luck. This has been going on for years! Should be an Apple fix or work around that is commonly available by now!