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  1. I’m running 10.13 (High Sierra) and mail searches seemed to miss stuff. So I followed various steps on the web: using mdutil to clear the indices, to disable then enable it; removing and putting back Spotlight in System Preferences; going into Safe Mode; re-installing the os. It changed things — from missing a few to failing completely!
    Mdfind was finding some stuff though. I looked at a one of the .emlx files under ~/Library/Mail and found there was a significant difference between running mdls on it and mdimport -d2 on it. The former showed a few generic keys, the latter lots of mail info.
    So in the end, I got a list of all .emlx files and ran mdimport on each one. It took a while, but mail searches are much better now. Whether they will stay that way or not time will tell…

  2. Quit and Restart worked! Thanks for a simple and quick fix. I also read the other solutions – I like the step-by-step simple explanations. Thankfully, I didn’t have to use them.

  3. Re-indexing was the step that fixed my mail search. I tried all the others first. Thanks for your help.

  4. My Mac will no longer search my mail (multiple mailboxes) or history. Spotlight search works. Cannot find a fix for that issue. Don’t want to rebuild mailboxes. Tried SMC a few times, only works temporarily.

  5. My Spotlight is working fine. My mail has been an issue for a long time. Apple told me to reset the SMC. I have done this a few times, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. When I search mail on my Mac it doesn’t find anything I am searching for, even simple senders whom I get daily emails from. I am concerned that constantly resetting the SMC is not good for my Mac. I need this to work. Do not want to rebuild my emails. Years ago, I lost 40,000 emails from doing that, following a techs step-by-step, live. Won’t do it again.

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