Mail search not working

Since moving to High Sierra (and new to me iMac) Search in Mail has not worked. I've tried re-indexing Spotlight Mail folder, Deleted the Envelope files in the Library, rebuilt the mail boxes, deleted the account and reinstalled. Nothing has any effect and I just get the message 'No message selected'. I can access mail just fine and can send email, I just cannot search. Anything else I can try (I think I've exhausted the suggestions on the Apple forums (along with many, many others it seems) to no avail). Failing getting a fix, what is the current thinking for a replacement mail app?

Hi Sawday,

I don't mean to insult your intelligence or the diligence of your research; but I presume you came across this "reported" solution in your travels?

"I just found the culprit. The entire Mail tree on the file system had an extended attribute
"com.apple.quarantine", which you can find this way :
> ls -ld@ Mail
drwx------@ 14 simonpie staff 448 29 mar 19:51 Mail
com.apple.quarantine 19

So I removed the extended attributes this way :
> sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine Mail

I added the ~Library folder to spotlight exclusion and removed it 20 seconds later. And tadam. Spotlight was reeindexing all my mails and emails were appearing in both mail and spotlight."


Ian

Hi Ian. I did see that but maybe I'm doing some thing wrong as I just got 'No such file or directory' message with the terminal command and I've added the library folder to spotlight exclusion list and then removed it to no avail.

Paul

Paul, issue a "cd ~/Library" before you do the rest. The Mail directory is in your Library folder.

Ian, can you give a link for where you found that set of terminal commands? I would like to know what the results actually mean. TIA

Sure thing: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8316188

One of many I looked at.

Ian

IWT said:

Sure thing: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8316188

One of many I looked at.

Ian

Click to expand...

That's the one I saw. Will try the CD command line first later... Time for dinner here

Paul

Ian - I've now tried with the CD command before the others as you detailed earlier. I then added the mail library to Spotlight Privacy exclusion list and then removed it. Spotlight doesn't seem to be re-indexing yet (half an hour later). Maybe I should leave it overnight to see if will start during a quiet time?

I think you might need to add the library to the exclusion list and then give it a bit to catch on to the change before removing it again.

Still no joy unfortunately. I've tried all the suggestions on this thread but to no effect.

I can search my Hotmail emails in outlook (app and web mail), my icloud emails through icloud.com and my gmail and yahoo mail through those sites. So for now it's goodbye to Apple's Mail and I'll access my email in other ways while I search for a suitable replacement app (recommendations welcome).

Thanks for trying Jake and Ian.