Saturday, December 13, 2008

"Entire Message" search disabled / grayed-out in Mail.app

The Apple discussion forums are full of people complaining about
Mail.app being naughty and not allowing to search by "Entire Message".

I've also wasted some hours trying to work around this when it
inflicted me, with no luck.

Until, finally, I tried merely restarting the machine and vóila! It
was back...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mail.app uses the Spotlight index to search "Entire Message' -- was Spotlight somehow re-indexing>

JS said...

Hello

I came across this post when searching for a solution to this problem. It IS a byproduct of spotlight indexing. My "Entire Message" facility was disabled and spotlight was doing its thing. It just finished, and the facility has returned.

J

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the info on Spotlight indexing. My "entire message" was grayed out, so I checked Spotlight, and, sure enough, it was indexing.

Phil said...

As awesome as this solution sounds, I have this problem and spotlight isn't doing anything.

Anonymous said...

#If your like me and for some reason disabled
#the metadata server and then forgot about it then
#make sure that metadata server runs on startup
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
#and now enable metadata for the root filesystem
sudo mdutil -i on /
#in my case spotlight began to rebuild indexes at this point, but you may need to run
sudo mdutil -E /

#Wait for spotlight to finish and enjoy
#Btw, this can be copy pasted into Terminal.app
#Hopefully this helps the futures frustrated souls