Mac software
Resolving riddles and restrictions with what you want to run on your Mac
Mail fail and missing mailboxes
Q Search has stopped working in Mail. When I tried rebuilding mailboxes, my mail archives vanished. How can I recover them and get search working?
by MIKE ATHERTON
A Sometimes this can be fixed by simply restarting your Mac. If that doesn’t help, try starting it up in Safe mode (on an Intel model, with the ß key held), leaving it for a couple of minutes, then restarting in regular mode.
Losing Mail search seems relatively common, and on its own isn’t a serious sign, although it can be tricky getting it to work again. One common suggestion is to start Mail up with the ß key held to stop it from selecting a message when it opens, or to rebuild its mailboxes manually in the app, using the Rebuild command in the Mailbox menu. Forcing Spotlight to re-index it doesn’t normally help, though.
However, the fact that your mail archives have vanished suggests this problem may be more severe, and a result of one of the bugs which have plagued those using Mail in Big Sur. Look for those mailboxes in their folder, normally in one of the folders in ~/Library/Mail/V9. If you can’t find them there, you may need to restore them from your most recent backup.