[solved] OS X 10.7 Lion and mail search not working…

I was stunned to find out that the search function on the Mail.app wasn’t working anymore since I’ve upgraded my Mac from Snow Leopard 10.6.8 to (the very cool) Lion 10.7. Thought it could be Spotlight not working, or something else.

Well, as it turns out, it’s a combination of 2 problems:

1) turn Spotlight indexing on: sudo mdutil -i on /
2) when using IMAP, configure your account to Keep a message for viewing offline

That’s it! Where Snow Leopard was able to search thru already downloaded mail (although the above option was enabled), Lion can’t.

Now the search is working great!

10 thoughts on “[solved] OS X 10.7 Lion and mail search not working…

  1. I had the exact same issue and it was really getting me irritated!

    Turning on Spotlight indexing seems to have done the trick.

    Thanks!!

  2. Thanks for the tip! That was a very strange oversight with the new system that was driving me mental. Not sure why they would nix indexing by default — I’d assume it was a good reason.

  3. thank you so much. after entering the above in the terminal window and confirming with my password, my hdd started being indexed.
    After some minutes spotlight and mail could find everything again.

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