MacOS – How to fix Lion Mail’s search functionality

macosmail.appsearch

I made a clean install of Lion, configured Mobile Me in System Preferences.

So, when I opened Mail, my Mobile Me account was already configured and it started downloading my mails.

Everything worked fine except search. I can't search among every mails. The only search I can do using is "from" or "to" a contact of my address book.

Searching the web, I discovered some potential solutions that I tried unsuccessfully. Here's a list of what I already done :

repairing permissions
disabling Spotlight and re-enabling Spotlight for my whole disk (via the preference pane & via the terminal)
deleting the "envelope-index" file and get mail re-index all my mails
rebuilding each mailboxes
deleting ~/Library/Mail, ~/Library/Mail Downloads, ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.* in order to start over
starting again from my ~/Library/Mail folder from my Snow Leopard installation.
starting again without configuring Mobile Me in system preferences but directly in Mail (as different computer user)

None of these actions fixed my problem.

Have you got any ideas?

Edit :

I made a new clean install of Lion on an external hard drive, configured my Mobile Me account directly when opening Mail.app and everything worked fine. I tried to copy Mail.app-related files to my main installation of Lion, but that didn't work. My latest solution would be install Lion again on my internal hard drive, but I would prefer not to do so. I'm still hoping there's another solution.

Best Answer

I had the same problem and it turned out the index was broken.

A rebuild didn't work for me so I had to quit Mail and type (in the terminal):

cd ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/
rm -rf Envelope\ Index Envelope\ Index-shm  Envelope\ Index-wal

After that, reopening the Mail app took some time for the index to rebuild but it fixed the search index.

Thanks to MacRumors for the answer

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