One of the things I’ve always loved about macOS has been the spotlight search functionality. A quick command-space, a few strokes of the keyboard, hit return, and voila an app launched or a file found. However, in recent times spotlight has seemed to get funky or unresponsive, especially when using search within mail.app.

The most annoying spotlight failures are in mail.app. I use mail.app as my main email client to pull my various gmail accounts together in one inbox. So, today I am looking for an email, I type from:person name fwd sell and it comes up with ZERO results. I try various incarnations and cannot find a stupid email from less than 2 months ago. I mention this to my wife and she tells me she just searches in gmail on the web. We use mail.app with google gmail. I’ve never used it with iCloud, maybe it’s better, same walled garden ecosystem and all y’know.

But, it SHOULD work! I give up, I type the exact same search criteria in gmail on the web and it comes up as the first result. I used to have a lot of faith in the quality of Apple software releases, but the last few release of macOS and iOS have had some annoying bugs. I still prefer the UI to desktop Linux or Windows, but…

Ok so you want solutions not complaining, so here are a few tips to maintain your mail.app and keep it minty fresh:

• Practice good email hygiene.
  • Delete those old emails, empty those spam folders, and remove old attachments to reduce your total mailbox size.
• Rebuild your mailboxes
  • Rebuilding your mailboxes re-downloads your email from what is stored on the mail servers.
  • Launch mail.app, select your mailbox on the left pane list and then select Mailbox > Rebuild
• Reindex your mailboxes
  • Reindexing your mailboxes
  • Make sure mail.app is closed
  • In the Finder, press Command-Shift-L to open the Library folder and then navigate to Mail > V8 (or whichever version you are using) > MailData, then delete the following files (NOTE: I suggest backing them up first):
    • Envelope Index
    • Envelope Index-shm
    • Envelope Index-wal
  • Relaunch mail.app, click ‘Continue’, and let it import, reindex, and build new envelope index files. Be patient, it could take awhile, especially if you have 375,000 emails like I do.

Happy emailing.