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Apple Mail search "entire message" Saga

Recently I, like many others, lost the ability to search in "entire message" in mail.app. We could search From, and Subject just fine, but not IN our messages (which is tragic when you have a lot of mail).

The problem began somewhere around OS 10.4.3 and persisted through updates all the way to 10.4.6

Here are a few solutions that were suggested on various bulletin boards:

1. Back up mail, remove and re-import into mail.app. This was reported NOT to work so I didn't try it.
2. One fellow suggested that this worked for him:
   You need to use 'terminal' and 'mdutil' to re-index your hard drive.

   In Terminal, turn off indexing for your drive. example:
   sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_1

   Then use mdutil again to turn indexing back on for your drive
   sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/your_hard_drive_name_1

   I tried this and it did NOT work.

3. Re-index HD:
   a) open System Preferences
   b) choose "Spotlight"
   c) click "Privacy" button
   d) click the "+" button
   e) choose your hard drive
   f) click the "-" button and close System Preferences
   g) click Spotlight magnifying glass at the top right of your screen and enter any search word -- you will see that your computer is re-indexing your HD for use with spotligh -- but ALSO for mail.app as they use the same underlying technology.

   I tried this and re-indexing of my 400GB HD (with confirmed search within M$ Office documents!) took all night (good thing I did this before bed and never turn off my computer M-F).

   When I awoke the "entire message" search did, indeed work again.

Posted by Aaron R. Deutsch on April 5, 2006 12:56 PM

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