Mail search does not find messages that appear in Spotlight

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Level 1

8 points

Mail search does not find messages that appear in Spotlight

I have several mail accounts, with a combined total in excess of 50K messages. When I search inside of the Mail app, in many cases only a subset of the results is found. If I use Spotlight search outside of the mail app, selecting the Mail tab, I see many more messages for the same search criteria. I have tried doing the Rebuild command for the Mailbox inside of the Mail app, but that doesn't seem to do anything.

I am running Tahoe 26.1

Any suggestions?

MacBook Pro (M3 Pro, 2023)

Posted on Nov 7, 2025 7:09 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

AlWeir

Level 5

4,874 points

Nov 7, 2025 7:28 AM in response to jalynn2

Reset Mail's Index Files: This is often the most direct fix for this specific problem.

Quit the Mail app.

In Finder, click Go in the menu bar, then select Go to Folder...

Type ~/Library/Mail/MailData and press Enter.

In the MailData folder, look for and delete all files that start with Envelope Index (e.g., Envelope Index, Envelope Index-shm, Envelope Index-wal).

Relaunch Mail. It will present a dialog about importing messages and will rebuild the index from scratch. This can take a while.

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