Several users who updated to macOS Ventura have said that Mail search is not working or the search results don’t appear as expected. You can search your emails to find a specific message in your inbox. On your Mac, you can do mail searchers in Mail or from the Spotlight app. In this article, I explain how you can fix this mail search problem in Ventura.
We previously wrote a lot of Mail troubleshooting articles. There are two of them that I recommend that you review:
If this article does not help you, you may want to read them too. The good news is that when Mail search isn’t working on Mac running macOS Ventura, it’s almost always a simple software problem. This means that it is highly likely that you can fix it yourself by following the steps below.
How to fix Mail search issues in Ventura
As I stated above, you can use Spotlight to find an email. If Spotlight is not finding the email messages, try restarting your Spotlight indexing. This step also includes deleting the Mail indexes. Follow these steps:
- Quit the Mail app (Mail > Quit Mail).
- Open Terminal on your Mac (Applications > Utilities).
- Enter the following command and hit enter to clear the indexes. You will need to enter your Mac’s password.
sudo mdutil -i off -E - Enter the following command and hit enter to verify:
sudo mdutil -s - Enter the following command to restart indexing. You will again be asked to enter your password:
sudo mdutil -i on
And now once again enter the following command to verify:
sudo mdutil -s
After these, let’s now delete the Mail indexes. Follow these steps:
- In Finder, press and hold the Option key and select Go.
- From the dropdown menu, click Library.
- Open the Mail folder.
- Open the V9 folder. (This is the Ventura version).
- Open the MailData folder.
- Delete the files that have Envelope Index names. There may be a few. Drag them to the Trash.
- Restart your Mac.
Open the Mail app, and check to see if you can search now.
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