see Sidha33 – near the bottom.

It worked a treat, all was well until today! Over the weekend I had a sudden increase in GB. Somehow I lost around 35 GB on my 160 GB macbook pro. I used Whatsize to show that spotlight v100 was 35 GB – so I then used MainMenu to rebuild the spotlight index. Great news! I got my 35 GB back…But

This morning I now have the same issue as before – spotlight has stop working.

Despite repeating the above, and all the other methods I have come across, mds simply won’t rebuild. It stays active for a few minutes and then stops.

I hope the above helps you guys – it did for me, at least for a while…back to the drawing board

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it only restores the Spotlight functionality partially. Searches on specific mailboxes still don’t work, and Spotlight fails to index messages added after the mdimport. So you have to redo it regularly.

I trust Spotlight searches in Mail so little that I virtually assume that it’s going to go badly, and quickly and reflexively resort to other means of finding what I’m looking for as soon as it’s becoming clear that Spotlight isn’t helping. But then again my Mail.app has always be, er, “special,” what with completely non-functional junk mail filtering, and the way it displays about half of all my mail as being “to” a woman from my Address Book who is not at all me. And so on.

Anyway, I have had some luck with semi-regularly re-indexing from scratch using the handy little Spotless utility. Usually that helps. A bit. For a while. Mail.app relaunches also often work, and it’s a lot faster than re-indexing. An interesting workaround is to do a spotlight search of your messages from the Finder: this often succeeds where Mail fails.

I also swear a lot at it, but I’m not sure if that helps or just makes me feel better.

After rebuilding the entire Spotlight index, I went back to Mail and, sure enough, Spotlight search was completely broken again, with searches on “Entire Message” not even working for “All Mailboxes” any longer. So I used the tip above to force Spotlight to reimport Mail’s folder, and now searches on “Entire Message” are working for “All Mailboxes”, but still are not working when the focus is on a specific mailbox.

So this leads me to think that the MailTags importer had nothing to do with it, and that it is indeed a problem with Spotlight itself. Unfortunately, problems do persist across restarts. And I don’t see any relevant messages in the system log.

By “markedly different,” I did indeed mean the content and localized stuff. Apart from that, there doesn’t appear to be anything significant missing. So I don’t think the problem is there. The problem is with Mail’s ability to tap into the Spotlight index for its searches.

If mdfind does its job properly it suggests that your Mail is properly indexed (so probably no launch services related problems which keep the indexing from happening) and just the Mail application may be bad at running the Spotlight query. Personally I haven’t seen that one yet. Does it persist across restarts? Are there any log messages when running the queries?

It’s hard to tell what you mean by ‘markedly different’. If things are all right, the output will look quite different but the data inside it will be essentially the same (with mdls not containing the content and mdimport listing things like localised file type names). Things tend to be bad when big chunks of information are missing. But it sounds like that isn’t the case for you.

Luckily things are still working fine for me. But now I’ll expect them to break any moment…

mdfind returns the expected results, since it’s equivalent to a system-wide Spotlight search, which works just fine.

The output of the mdimport -d2 command on the message files is markedly different from the regular mdls output, but i don’t know if that means anything. In any case, the search still fails after all this.

It looks to me like Spotlight is quite broken for Mail, really.

You are correct, I do have an mds process running. I was only looking at my user processes. mds is owned by root.

And yes, the limited searches use a different index, possibly the Envelope Index. But a search on the entire message uses the Spotlight database, and I don’t understand why it works for All Mailboxes but not when the focus is on a specific mailbox.

* lsregister can be an extremely useful tool for dealing with the Launch Services database. I wouldn’t use the kill option unless absolutely necessary though as that may also delete assignments of file types to applications which you may have made in the Finder. With a bit of luck something like lsregister -f /Applications/Mail.app might suffice for your purposes.

* If you see the problem more frequently it might be interesting to run lsregister -dump before rebuilding the Launch Services database. It would also be interesting to see mdls output for elmx files in /Library/Mail and to see whether searching for terms in those messages with mdfind in the Terminal yields any results. Then try running mdimport -d2 on one of those files and look at the output. Try whether using the -r option of mdimport for the Mail importer solves the problem. Try whether restarting solves the problem. Plenty of things to try out, I guess.

* You absolutely have an mds process on your system. If you don’t Spotlight won’t work, which would explain the problem as well.

* I think that Mail’s subject-only searching uses a database separate from Spotlight’s. That can explain why those limited searches keep working.

And there is no such thing as “mds” in Leopard, as far as I know. I quit “mdworker” just in case. mdutil spawned a process called “Spotlight”, which proceeded to reindex everything (took about half an hour). But the Mail searches still don’t work right.

1. Enter the following into Terminal:

sudo rm -R .Spotlight-V100/

2. Go into Activity Monitor. Find the process “mds”. Kill it.

3. Enter the follow into Terminal:

sudo mdutil -E /

That should fix it (after Spotlight reindexes the drive).