Spotlight inside Mail won't search "Entire Message"

JPigford

JPigford

I'm awesome...seriously..
Whenever using the Spotlight Search inside Mail.app it won't find any emails when I select "Entire Message." Using From, To, and Subject it works fine though.
 
Erh... Works fine for me. Hm. Can't really think of anything. Normal troubleshooting: Create a test user to see if it works for 'him'. If it does, the problem is somewhere in Mail.app's prefs in your user's library folder...
 
Okay, so I did a little bit of troubleshooting with the search in mail and have come to the conclusion that it is only searching "Entire Message" if the email was received in the past 7 days. It will search all the other fields (From, To, Subject) for any date. But If I select to search "Entire Message", it's only searching emails from the past 7 days...is there some setting somewhere or is this most likely corrupted prefs?
 
Mine finds very old messages, too, by "entire message". So, yes, I'd still try the prefs thing.
 
Maybe Spotlight hasn't gotten to your older messages yet. It took several hours for Spotlight to index my hard drive.

I have approximately 2 GB of mail, the oldest being from March 2001, and Spotlight has no trouble finding them.

If you have problems with Spotlight not finding stuff, there is a way to force it to redo the index for a particular drive, folder or file. In Terminal you can use a utility called "mdimport" to force Spotlight to index any volume, folder or file. Start Terminal and type "man mdimport" (without the quotes) and hit return. That will give you a manual page showing you what you can do with mdimport.

You can also use "mdutil" to remove an index from a particular volume, which will be rebuilt automatically. This can come in handy if the database becomes corrupt. (Check "man mdutil" in Terminal.)

Notice also that you can exclude volumes, folders and files in the "Integrity" tab of Spotlights preferences in "System settings".

Hope this helps you, at least you have a couple of new tools to play with if it doesn't... :D
 
elander said:
Maybe Spotlight hasn't gotten to your older messages yet. It took several hours for Spotlight to index my hard drive.

I have approximately 2 GB of mail, the oldest being from March 2001, and Spotlight has no trouble finding them.

If you have problems with Spotlight not finding stuff, there is a way to force it to redo the index for a particular drive, folder or file. In Terminal you can use a utility called "mdimport" to force Spotlight to index any volume, folder or file. Start Terminal and type "man mdimport" (without the quotes) and hit return. That will give you a manual page showing you what you can do with mdimport.

You can also use "mdutil" to remove an index from a particular volume, which will be rebuilt automatically. This can come in handy if the database becomes corrupt. (Check "man mdutil" in Terminal.)

Notice also that you can exclude volumes, folders and files in the "Integrity" tab of Spotlights preferences in "System settings".

Hope this helps you, at least you have a couple of new tools to play with if it doesn't... :D
Click to expand...
It at one point WAS finding messages from years ago...then it just stopped. And I've actually reindexed twice. I'll be trashing the prefs later on to see if that fixes it.
 
Another question is where your mail is stored. IF it is on an IMAP server the message body may not have ever been seen by mail. I am not sure but I think if you synchronize the mailboxes then it will copy everything to locally to your mac. A good test would be to check if you could see the body of one of those messages while you are not connected tot he net. If you cannot bring them up then they are only on the server.

I can see why Mail.app would not sync a local copy of everything without you telling it to do so. Imagine the complaints if it were to try to download all Gigabytes of old mail over some old modem connection.
 
lurk said:
Another question is where your mail is stored. IF it is on an IMAP server the message body may not have ever been seen by mail. I am not sure but I think if you synchronize the mailboxes then it will copy everything to locally to your mac. A good test would be to check if you could see the body of one of those messages while you are not connected tot he net. If you cannot bring them up then they are only on the server.

I can see why Mail.app would not sync a local copy of everything without you telling it to do so. Imagine the complaints if it were to try to download all Gigabytes of old mail over some old modem connection.
Click to expand...
They're all POP and like I said, it at one point was searching everything just fine.

Also, just trashed prefs and it still won't search using "Entire Message" on messages over 1 week old.
 
Oops, I had loaded this page like an hour before I posted my reply. I like tabbed browsing but it can get you into trouble...

If you are using POP then the messages are all stored local and I can't offer help, sorry.
 
JPigford said:
Whenever using the Spotlight Search inside Mail.app it won't find any emails when I select "Entire Message." Using From, To, and Subject it works fine though.
Click to expand...


I've just noticed the exact same problem and found your message whilst looking for a fix.

I've read that it may have to do with the 10.4.1 update, so I'm going to try installing the downloaded full version. Then I'll try fixing permissions and forcing a Spotlight re-index if that fails

Grant
 
Ehhh ... this is kind of wierd.

It's working fine now. In just the time it took to write the my post here.

I forgot to mention that previously, The Spotlight menu wasn't showing Mail results either ... now it is again and I've done nothing except let some time pass. This makes me think that either dotMac syncing was going on and preventing access to the Mail database, although I have syncing set to once per day and usually it doesn't happen now and I have the s
'Sync' icon in my menu bar and it wasn't doing anything ... or ... perhaps Spotlight was adding to the index and thus it was inaccessible for a while.

I also ought to add, that I restarted the machine when the problem first appeared and that didn't help ... although, if something was being accessed that would make sense, since it would simply pick up where it left off before I restarted.

Grant
 
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