Since I upgraded to macOS Catalina this weak, the following features of Apple Mail no longer work:
I have tried reindexing everything using Spotlight and also rebuilding the mailboxes, but neither of these things works. What can I do? This seems like a real mess-up by Apple.
corespotlightd may be causing this.
Starting with macOS Catalina (10.15), Apple moved the indexing of Mail messages files from traditional Spotlight to a daemon called corespotlightd. Unfortunately, it looks like that this piece of software has some bugs that lead to
I've had severe problems like this from occasionally to frequently even still in the current macOS Monterey 12.4 when I finally identified corespotlightd being the bad guy.
There is a simple check if corespotlightd is causing your problem, and that's also how to fix it:
open Activity Monitor
search for the process called corespotlightd
Terminate it
When asked Do you really want to quit "corespotlightd"?, you must answer Force Quit, because a simple Quit won't actually terminate the daemon
The corespotligthd daemon will automatically be restarted, and Mail search should work again instantly without the need to restart the Mail app.
Of course, this is not a permanent fix. The problem can (and probably will) re-occur until Apple finally fixes it.
In such events where a problem arises due to multiple reasons, answers look like troubleshoot efforts. Cleaning up the comments, here's what I did on Mojave for an IMAP account:
~/Library/Mail/ and then delete the original folder associated with the troubling account. ~/Library/Mail/ from Spotlight index using Spotlight Preferences -> Privacy and revealing hidden folders in Finder layover.Do step one(backup) of above and take screenshots of Mail Preferences in case account specific settings like "rules" break down.
In Internet Accounts in System Preferences, remove the account. Wait for some reasonable time, and add it back.
Again if anything breaks(as OP says, smart mailboxes, not for me), replace the new folder under ~/Library/Mail/V6 with the backed up one.
Annoyingly, this seems to have been a problem with the initial release of macOS Catalina that disappeared when I installed the just-released Catalina update and rebooted. I tried all the steps mentioned in @ankii's answer (some of which were formerly in the comments), and unfortunately they didn't work, although evidently they have worked for many people in the past for problems very similar to this. Perhaps Apple quietly fixed this issue with the latest Catalina update, or it was a combination of the update and some of the previously-attempted steps.
Hopefully between these two answers, others who come across this question should find their solution!
I recently had the same problem on Ventura (13.3.1) and tried a lot of thing: restarting corespotlightd, re-indexing, safe mode and a lot of other things but nothing worked. However, once I renamed (or deleted) the folder ~/Library/Metadata, a lot of things worked again, like:
I'm using Ventura 13.6.7, and had this trouble on and off for about 7-10 days. (It started after I inadvertently ran so low on free space that my system froze.) But sslbrg's post provided a fix (I renamed and moved my ~/Library/Metadata folder.)
Thanks!
