Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
If that doesn't solve the problem, quit Mail, navigate to
~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData
and drag the files
Envelope Index
,
Envelope Index-shm
, and
Envelope Index-wal
to the Trash. When you launch Mail again, it'll tell you that you need to “import” all your
messages (just as it may have done when you upgraded from Mountain Lion to Mavericks).
Let it do so—it's recreating your envelope index from scratch, but don't worry, you won't lose
any messages, labels, message status, or other data—and when it finishes, your mailboxes
should behave correctly.
Fix Searching Errors
If searches in Mail fail blatantly (such as no results appearing for a very common term), even
after attempting the mailbox fixes in the previous topic, you can try any of several ways to fix
the problem. Try each of these things, in order, until the problem goes away:
1. Make sure that neither the folder
~/Library/Mail
nor any of its parent folders
is in Spotlight's Privacy list (in System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy).
2. You may have server-hosted mailboxes whose contents have not yet been down-
loaded to your computer. To ensure that they have been, choose Mailbox > Syn-
chronize
Account-Name
. If more than one account is configured, the account
names appear on a Synchronize submenu, but you can choose Mailbox > Syn-
chronize All Accounts to sync everything at once. Either way, this may take some
time.
3. Open
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal
and enter the following com-
mand, followed by Return, to re-import your Mail messages into the Spotlight
index:
mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/Mail.mdimporter
4. Still no luck? Trash your entire Spotlight index and allow Spotlight to rebuild it
from scratch. In Terminal, type:
sudo mdutil -E /
Press Return and enter your administrator password when prompted. The re-
building process goes on in the background, but may take several hours. When
it's finished, searching
should
work.
