10.7: Restore missing search results in Mail

Oct 26, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

After upgrading to Mac OS X Lion, I started searching for mail to find registration emails for software that I had to reinstall. I knew they were in my mailboxes because I had found them with no problem in my previous Snow Leopard Install. None of the emails were showing up when I did a search via Lion's search function.

After doing a search I found a thread on Apple Discussions that helped solved the problem but I went back to search for the thread so I thought I'd submit it as a hint.

The solution is to force Spotlight to re-index your hard drive. There are a few ways you can do this:

Follow this Apple Knowledge Base article,

or in Terminal type:

sudo mdutil -E /

You will need to enter your admin password to execute the Terminal command.

[crarko adds: I had to do a Spotlight re-index when I did the Lion upgrade. It took forever on the Firewire drive that I'm using. But afterwards searching behaves quite well.]

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Mac OS X Hints
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