email search not working after Catalina upgrade

To fix that issue.

1) Quit Mail.app

2) Stop, Clear, and Restart your Spotlight indexation. To do so : https://support.apple.com/HT201716 OR

• Open Terminal.app
• Stop and Flush Indexation
• sudo mdutil -i off -E /
• verify the status
• sudo mdutil -s /
• Restart it
• sudo mdutil -i on /
• verify the status again
• sudo mdutil -s /

3) Clear the Mail.app indexes. You will find some "Envelope Index*" files in your ~/Library/Mail/V7/MailData folder. Trash them and empty the Trash. (They will be rebuild after relaunching Mail.app, don't worry).

To do so:

• From the Finder > Goto Menu > Go to folder: "~/Library/Mail/V7/MailData".
• From the Terminal.app: "open ~/Library/Mail/V7/MailData" (then Enter)

Restart your Mac. Re-open Mail.app, and all we be fine again.

PS: You need all those steps, and in this order ;-)

Try this.

How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

I find that logging out and logging back in fixes the problem. I have an ongoing discussion with Apple Support regarding this problem. The case has progressed up to a senior analyst. Apple is aware of this problem, and the next time my Smart Mailboxes and Search in Mail stop working, I have a link to contact support directly.

If it was a Spotlight problem, wouldn't it be affecting search elsewhere like in the Finder and other apps? I find that this only affects Mail in Catalina. Other apps aren't affected.

Daniel - I found that after a restart, searcing Mail in Catalina will work as expected and then over the course of the day, will stop working. Restart and functionality is restored. I have not tried just logging out. I look forward to a solution as one doesn't realize the degree of mail searching one performs until it's broken.

I was on the phone with Apple Support again today because Search and Smart Mailboxes in Mail stopped working and they asked me to contact them if this happened again. What was interesting is that once this happens searches in Spotlight would not find anything in Mail. Spotlight searches would find items in the Finder, Messages, and other apps, but nothing from Mail.

Apple Support thinks it may be a problem with Spotlight's indexes.

They had me force Spotlight to rebuild its indexes by going to System Preferences, select SpotLight, and select Spotlight's Privacy tab. They had me drag my hard disk into the box on the Privacy tab to exclude the entire hard disk from being indexed by Spotlight. Then they had me remove my hard disk from the list of locations not to index. According to them, adding and removing my hard disk from that list will force Spotlight to rebuild its indexes for my hard drive.

Apple Support said it may take up to 24 hours to rebuild its indexes for my hard drive, but hopefully this will fix the problem with Search and Smart Mailboxes in Mail. They said to contact them if after 24 hours the problem still occurs.

This worked for me: delete the Smart Mailbox "Today".

I realized that since my Smart Mailboxes were working, the search functionality issue couldn't be too deep (Spotlight worked fine before except that no Mail search results appeared; now they do). I would suggest modifying/adding/removing Smart Mailboxes and seeing if that restores the general search functionality.

The 15.1 update seems to have fixed the problem with Smart Mailboxes and Search not working in Catalina. Since upgrading to 15.1, I went from October 30 through November 4 without logging out or restarting, and Smart Mailboxes and Search have worked all the time in Mail.

Note that you have to write down your smart mailbox rules, because they will be deleted with this process...

Absolutely not :) Smart rules or normal rules are not affected at all (I have thousand of rules). Be safe.

I'm talking about smart mail boxes. And In my case, I can confirm, they were removed. I had to recreate them.

Me too. Smart mail boxes are not related to Envelope Index files. So you certainly have removed more than needed. Best.

It's a temporary fix for me.