Mac software
Resolving riddles and restrictions with what you want to run on your Mac Mail fail and missing mailboxes
Q
Search has stopped working in Mail. When I tried rebuilding mailboxes, my mail archives vanished. How can I recover them and get search working?
ASometimes this can be fixed by simply restarting your Mac. If that doesn’t help, try starting it up in Safe mode (on an Intel model, with the ⇧ key held), leaving it for a couple of minutes, then restarting in regular mode.
Losing Mail search seems relatively common, and on its own isn’t a serious sign, although it can be tricky getting it to work again. One common suggestion is to start Mail up with the ⇧ key held to stop it from selecting a message when it opens, or to rebuild its mailboxes manually in the app, using the Rebuild command in the Mailbox menu. Forcing Spotlight to re-index it doesn’t normally help, though.
However, the fact that your mail archives have vanished suggests this problem may be more severe, and a result of one of the bugs which have plagued those using Mail in Big Sur. Look for those mailboxes in their folder, normally in one of the folders in ~/Library/ Mail/V9. If you can’t find them there, you may need to restore them from your most recent backup.
When you do recover those archives and search returns, you may find that Spotlight re-indexes all your mail again, and they might also be backed up as if they were fresh files. No one seems to understand why this happens, but it’s more likely with very large mailboxes, and in recent versions of macOS.