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Apple Mail troubles, rebuild spotlight index
Posted on 05/18 at 12:17 PM
I did some searching today on an issue I was having with Apple’s Mail program.
Messages I’d had in a custom mailbox had disappeared on me, 3,821 of them to be exact. (gogo BBEdit mailing list) I tried getting Mail to rebuild the folder but no go. I then shut down Mail, deleted that folders “Info.plist” file on the hard drive and restarted Mail. The app quickly reloaded my emails into view, but I then found I was unable to search for them via spotlight.
After some searching, I found a Terminal command you can use to have Spotlight properly rebuild its index for your boot drive. Couldn’t hurt, right? Seems to have fixed everything for me.
sudo mdutil -E -i on /
re: Found here
3 Comments
hmm interesting.
I had done the ‘rebuild’ option a number of times but it just wasn’t working for me. Deleting the Envelope Index is a way to force mail to rebuild its index, but I am not sure if it also updates spotlight. I’ll have to check this out now that I am on leopard too, might not be an issue anymore.
Thanks for the tips !!!
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I am using Mail 3.1 with Leopard… I was having a problem. I had 3 ways of accessing one of my email addresses (Pop, Imap, Exchange). After I decided to just use the Imap, I deleted all of the other emails via finder. Then Mail would show me the message header of an email… but it would think that it was showing you an email when it just showed an empty preview pane (opening also no joy).
I looked here and ran your terminal command, although I don’t think that was my problem (wasn’t with spotlight). Instead, I found an option under Mailbox (while having a single mailbox selected)… the last one called “Rebulid”. That didn’t seem to do much… although it did download a bunch of my messages again.
What finally worked was to go into my Users/ directory, Library/Mail and delete the (relatively) large “Envelope Index”. Then I restarted Mail, and it rebuilt this file (took a couple of minutes with 21,000 messages). This solved my problems.
BTW, nice site. I like your “expand code” js. Your look and feel is slick, but not overwhelming.