Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Fixing macOS Big Sur Search Bugs

Jesse Squires:

Search in the Mail.app on Big Sur stopped working for some users. In addition to the workarounds mentioned here, Ben used OnyX to delete Mail’s Mailboxes index. After that, search in Mail.app started working for him again.

More recently, Alexis tweeted about an issue with Spotlight Search (and others replied with the same issue). Apparently, for some users, Spotlight was taking insanely long to search. For Alexis, it took almost 45 minutes to find a single file. I suggested using OnyX to rebuild the Spotlight index, which fixed the issue for him.

OnyX is available here, and there are also manual ways of rebuilding these indexes.

Previously:

3 Comments RSS · Twitter


Spotlight sucks more in Big Sur too. It often doesn't put the top result that I expect and there's a noticeable delay in showing results -- both of which I never encountered in Catalina or Mojave.


Beatrix Willius

The index in Mail has never worked properly. Since early versions I had to reset the index now and then. The more interesting questions are:
- Why does this still happen?
- Why isn't the problem being fixed?


Hang on. Does this mean that Mail.app search has been working well for people up until now?

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