Mail has always been spotty, but Mail's search completely stopped working for me around the time I upgraded to Big Sur.
Currently, it finds only a few random scraps and doesn't search the entire mailbox. Spotlight still works; searching by the text in Spotlight shows a match, but clicking on the match (to open it in Mail) does nothing. I've tried rebuilding the mailbox and I've tried wiping the entire Mail directory; nothing works. Apparently other people have the same issue, but I haven't found a solution.
This is too bad, because Mail.app is probably the most functional, no-nonsense client for macOS. I've tried some others (Airmail, Spark, Polymail, etc.), but they have a lot of usability issues and weird features (like Sparrow's team support) that are irrelevant to me.
Ugh, by default Mail.app just searches in the current mailbox. When you start a search, on the top of the left sidebar, just above your list of mailboxes, a new “All Mailboxes” folder will appear. Click that to search the whole app.
I don’t know why they did this. I don’t know who was asking for it.
Currently, it finds only a few random scraps and doesn't search the entire mailbox. Spotlight still works; searching by the text in Spotlight shows a match, but clicking on the match (to open it in Mail) does nothing. I've tried rebuilding the mailbox and I've tried wiping the entire Mail directory; nothing works. Apparently other people have the same issue, but I haven't found a solution.
This is too bad, because Mail.app is probably the most functional, no-nonsense client for macOS. I've tried some others (Airmail, Spark, Polymail, etc.), but they have a lot of usability issues and weird features (like Sparrow's team support) that are irrelevant to me.