[eggman]

I just moved from Entourage to Mail, and I'm pretty happy with it so far... except for one thing: searches aren't working.

Well, that's not entirely true: I can search by "From", "To" or "Subject" just fine. But searching "Entire Message" yields zilch. Nada. Bupkuss. I mean, I can search for my own name in my Inbox and find nothing. That just ain't right.

But this may be a symptom of a larger issue, because Spotlight apparently isn't indexing my mail. In fact, I'd not be a whit surprised if Mail uses Spotlight's database to do it's own message searches. And it's not just Mail - Spotlight also isn't finding Address Book contacts.

Not being completely dim, I (of course) checked out Spotlight in System Preferences... and sure enough, Mail Messages and Contacts are both checked. I tried toggling the check boxes, just to make sure. (It's kinda the digital equivalent of jimmying the toilet handle...)

So, if anyone has any brilliant ideas, I'm all ears. Or, given that this is textual, all eyes.

[mduell]

Do you use IMAP or POP3?

[eggman]

Good question, after all, IMAP email wouldn't be on my hard disk.
But, no, it's POP3. And, yeah, I know about all of the wonderfulness of IMAP vs. POP3, but I actually like the security/privacy of actually having my email in my own premises rather than on a server somewhere 3000 miles away.

I found an article on Mac OSX Hints about forcing a reindex of a volume using mdutil, so this is what I'm trying... and when I ran sudo mdutil -s / it indicated that my boot volume hadn't been enabled for indexing, which was a shocker.

Yeah, that could explain it. But what could explain that?

Anyways, I'm expecting it to take a nice long time to reindex my 500GB drive, with about 320GB of data on it.