6 thoughts on “Search Not Working or Incomplete Results in OSX El Capitan Mac Mail”

  1. Or as happened to someone I work with, check the Spotlight tab to see if it is set to Icon only. Not sure why that is an option, but you won’t find anything if it is selected,

    1. Hello, old thread here, but how to you change the Spotlight Tab mentioned above to show NOT just the icon?

  2. This actually worked for me after upgrading to El Capitan, spotlight searches were incomplete or not working properly. I removed the hard drive from the search, waited a few minutes and added it back in. My problem now appears to be fixed. I have been fighting with this for months! Thank you 🙂

  3. I have tried all three fixes and none of them have worked–upgraded to latest El Capitan. I suspect there is something wrong due to my boot disk. My boot disk on my iMac is an external SSD, because the iMac Main disk failed. Any suggestions?

  4. I’ve done all of these, multiple times, in different orders. Restarted. Upgraded to High Sierra, done them all, all over again. Still nothing.

    After all this, if i type “f” in the Mail searchbox, I’m offered a random selection of past senders, probably about 1 or 2% of all those with “f” in their address. If I type “fi”, there are three suggestions, none of them my long term partner of whom there are hundreds of emails.If I select any of the offerings to search for, no emails are ever turned up.

    Useless.

    Spotlight never showed “indexing” after doing fix #2.

    I don’t care about Spotlight, it’s crap anyhow. But I need to be able to search my Mail.

    1. Did you ever sort this out , i find the same thing , ill get random replies back on a search but typically nothing rect , usually months back only for some reason ?

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