Resolved Mail search not working

[bmac89]

Hello,

I have just noticed that the search function in Mac mail app no longer works on my iMac running El Capitan. It was working previously but now it find 0 results no matter what I search. I have restarted the computer multiple times but this did not fix it.

Is there any things I can try to fix this without ‘rebuilding’ the entire mailbox?

I really hope I don’t need to rebuild the mailbox as this will take days as my mailbox is many many gigabytes in size and I’m not even sure this will fix the issue?

Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks

 

[bmac89]

I have discovered the cause of this problem. Somehow the Mac's hard drive was added to the privacy list in spotlight settings.

I have no idea how this has happened as no one has touched the spotlight settings on the computer and it was working previously. It is now re-indexing the hard drive and mail search is working again.

P.S. Come to think of it, the issue started occurring (on the internal hard drive) after booting up Mac OSX from a seperate partition on an external drive. I'm thinking this may have led to this issue or maybe the settings got changed on the external drive.