I'm assuming I need to do something like fixing whatever journaling data I had, or re-indexing Spotlight. Yes, I'm making guesses...so be patient.

Spotlight doesn't seem to be consistent in getting results. For example, when it didn't locate a folder using one of the words in the folder name, I asked it to find the folder by typing in the entire folder name. Nada.

The file was in Apple Mail. I did a bit of testing and used other part and full file names with various results. Sometimes a single word would find some files with that word in the name, but not others.

I opened Disk Utility and found that the Enable/Disable button is not functional. Cocktail was able to confirm that journaling is enabled.

So, all this leads me to think a database or index must be incomplete.

Am I on the right track? Where do I go from here?

If you want to have reset Spotlight so that it re-indexes your drive, go to System Preferences > Spotlight and select Privacy. Drag the hard drive icon into the Privacy pane and drop it there. Then, select the hard drive and click - to remove it. Spotlight will then commence re-indexing. (You can do the same thing with OnyX if you select Maintenance and then click the Rebuild tab.)

If you really want to disable journaling, Disk Utility can do it but it's not obvious. Select the volume and then Option-click the File menu. Disable Journaling will appear as one of the choices.

It's worth noting that Journaling has nothing to do with Spotlight.

Spotlight should show email attachments, but note that Spotlight doesn't search system files such as files contained in the Library by default. To do that, do a Command-F in the Finder and then select the Kind pop-up and select "Other..."

There you can find System files and check to add it to the menu so it can be used as one of your search options to find files such as files containd

^ This.

And saving searches is a good way to speed things up for frequently used patterns.

Thanks. I've just done that and it's just completed the re-index but still doesn't find the folder. I also own OnyX, so I'll give it a try in the morning.


No, that's not something I'd do. I had thought that the answer might be found in Disk Utility and therefore looked there. i.e. had journaling somehow got turned off?

When I saw that the enable/disable button wasn't even functional, I wondered if Disk Utility might itself be faulty and thereby be contributing to the issue.

Just a thought (trying to be simple about this): Is that folder included in any items that appear in Spotlight's Privacy pane? Also, is the folder checked in Spotlight's Search Results pane?

Thanks for the info...journaling was just a guess on my part although I still wonder why the enable/disable button isn't functional in Disk Utility.


Thanks for that, too. It's good to know.

No, not in the Privacy pane. And, yes, Folders is checked off in Search Results

I am now "post-OnyX" and I've done a bit more testing. It seems that the folder in question isn't the only one that Spotlight doesn't want to find. It's not finding any folder in Mail.

I've also tried Kevin's command-F at the Finder level and the result is the same - nothing from Mail. EDIT: I changed the search parameter and asked command-F to find PDFs with the word and it found PDFs attached to Mail messages.

I am now going to try removing the spotlight.plist from my User preferences. EDIT: Done, no change.

For lack of a better idea, try the old voodoo of using Disk Utility to Repair Disk and Repair Permissions. If you don't feel like waiting to boot from the 10.6 DVD, you can run Verify Disk to see if anything comes up before you take the plunge. This may not help but it won't hurt.

I've done that, using my clone drive, but it doesn't change anything.

I've also, in addition to re-indexing with Onyx, used TechTool Pro 6 to rebuild the directory and optimize files and the volume. After optimization I re-indexed again. So far I've done pretty much everything, except stand on my head and spit nickels, and nothing changes.

I could live with Spotlight not finding folders in Mail as I pretty much know where they all are. However, if Spotlight isn't working properly, the concern becomes "What is it not finding on other searches?" I did a couple of quick searches with words that should have returned a pile of results but got minimal results.

EDIT: I'm now wondering if there is a more 'global' issue that's affecting searches. I just downloaded EasyFind to see what it would do.

I gave EasyFind a three word phrase that I know is in more that 100 Word documents and I asked it to look in Files. It didn't find even one.

I then asked it to find, using any of the words, and It found a pile of stuff but still not one of the Word documents.

How about (re)applying the Combo 10.6.8 Update? This is a shotgun approach but has been known to cure weird issues.

> I gave EasyFind a three word phrase that I know is in more that 100 Word documents and I asked it to look in Files. It didn't find even one.

I then asked it to find, using any of the words, and It found a pile of stuff but still not one of the Word documents.

Funny you should mention that, because the same thing happened to me just yesterday, when I found that for some odd reason I had to have "Include: Package Contents" checked in addition to "Search for: File Contents" before EasyFind would find words in (Edit: some) text docs. (I keep "Comparison: Ignore Case" checked by default.)

Edit: Hmmm... Maybe not, because I just found that EF is not finding words in Excel spreadsheets.

It made a marginal change. I used the same three word phrase, that's in more than 100 Word documents, and Spotlight found three of them....two from last month and one from 2009.

At this point, the only suggestion that I can make is to reinstall 10.6. I have run Archive and Install with 10.5 but it appears to be a bit different in 10.6 (and I have never done it). Still, according to that link, you should be able to do the equivalent and keep your files, folders and settings. The instructions for A&I apply to 10.5 as well as previous OS versions.

Ouch! That's not something I'm in a great hurry to do, given the potential pain in the _______ if it doesn't go right. I've done a bit of checking and it seems Snow Leopard doesn't have Archive and Install - that it does the install and keeps all your settings et cetera in the process. However, Murphy's Law and all that.....

I've looked at my Snow Leopard disk (10.6) and the PDFs on it don't say anything about this. I'll check a bit more....perhaps SL reinstall is worth a new thread.

Thanks for all your help.

What's the name of the folder you're searching for and where is it located on the drive? Which search field are you using.... Mail, Spotlight, Finder, etc.?

I'm using Spotlight and the folder is in Mail. Assume the folder name is "A Big Mystery" and I conduct a search just using "Big".

Spotlight only finds a Font folder containing "Big" even after all the re-indexing, et cetera.

EasyFind locates a couple of folders, neither of which is the one I want.

I tried Find Any File and it can locate six folders with "Big" in the name, including the one I want.

Adding to the mystery is that Spotlight no longer seems to be able to look for text inside a document. The Spotlight test I ran, with a three word phrase that's inside at least 100 Word documents, only generated three results.

After a re-indexing it still only found three...except that they were a different three.

I'm just trying to understand your thinking here. The folder is a mail folder as seen in the left column of your mail app?

First, I'm not sure why one would be searching for that in the first place, but anyway... if it is that type of folder, it's not actually a folder in the finder. It's a .mbox which is recognized as a "Mail Mailbox" kind rather than a "Folder". Also since mail is stored in your Library, the Spotlight search will not find items there in raw file terms, but only in message metadata form.

If I Find in the Finder and include my system files, I get the .mbox files in my results when searching for my Mail "Folders".

If that's not the type of folder you're searching for, I think it needs to be clarified further, because I'm having trouble determining what a Folder in Mail would be otherwise.

Seems you have many problems there, and me here with no solutions.


With respect to Spotlight and Word specifically —it all relies on a special file (or files) for those two to have a workable association. Typical location for those items would be /Library/Spotlight/

ls -ld /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft*
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Jan 21 2009 /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter


If something is wrong with that item (or it's missing maybe... or there are more than one butting heads with each other), then Spotlight won't be able to search Word docs with any accuracy.

Or perhaps there is another .mdimporter file located somewhere else getting into the mix...

mdimport -L

^ will list all that Spotlight is currently employing. [they can even reside inside apps themselves]

And...

mdimport -L 2>&1 |grep -i microsoft

will filter out all except those which have the string Microsoft in their name.

Other than that, ::shrug::

Yes.


I have Mail "Folders" nested several layers deep (up to 8 or 10) and, in this case, I was in a hurry and thought a quick way to find the "Folder" would be to use Spotlight.


I did not understand that a "Folder" in Mail is not actually a Folder. I see the Icon and assume that's what it is. I do not know what "message metadata form" means.


I have to take your word on that. I thought I would check (using Command F) just for the educational aspect but could not see, given the apparent options, how I would add system files to the search.

However, it's not a search I would normally use anyway. I've always found Spotlight more than adequate....until now.

I am happy to accept that Spotlight won't find what I mistakenly thought was a "Folder" in Mail. However, the disconcerting issue now is the fact that Spotlight is not locating files it should be finding....such as Word documents. That is very worrisome.

But thanks for taking a shot at it anyway (although I have no idea what the results mean). This is what I got using your Terminal instructions:

I entered:

ls -ld /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft*
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Jan 21 2009 /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter

and got:

firstname-lastnames-imac:~ myname$ ls -ld /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft*
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 18 Dec 2009 /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Entourage.mdimporter
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 21 Jan 2009 /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter
firstname-lastnames-imac:~ myname$ drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Jan 21 2009 /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter



I entered:

mdimport -L

and got:

firstname-lastnames-imac:~ myname$ mdimport -L
2012-02-27 17:34:23.011 mdimport[705:903] Paths: id(501) (
"/Library/Spotlight/iWork.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/Font.mdimporter",
"/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/Archives.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/Audio.mdimporter",
"/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Entourage.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/Image.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/Application.mdimporter",
"/Library/Spotlight/StuffIt.mdimporter",
"/Library/Spotlight/AppleWorks.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter",
"/Library/Spotlight/iWeb.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/CoreMedia.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/Chat.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/iPhoto.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/PS.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/Mail.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/vCard.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/PDF.mdimporter",
"/Library/Spotlight/GBSpotlightImporter.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/iPhoto8.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/Bookmarks.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/SystemPrefs.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/iCal.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/MIDI.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/QuartzComposer.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/Automator.mdimporter"
)
firstname-lastnames-imac:~ myname$



I entered:

mdimport -L 2>&1 |grep -i microsoft

and got:

firstname-lastnames-imac:~ myname$ mdimport -L 2>&1 |grep -i microsoft
"/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter",
"/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Entourage.mdimporter",
firstname-lastnames-imac:~ myname$

1. In Finder, type Command-F. A Finder search window opens. Enter your search term(s).

2. Click the plus sign at the right side of the window to add another search condition.

3. Click on Kind, and choose Other… from the pop-up menu. A sheet descends with a long alphabetical list of attributes.

4. Scroll down to System files and select it. It's not a bad idea to check the In Menu checkbox while you're at it; this will save having to invoke the Other… sheet in any future case that you want to include System files in your search.

5. Click OK, then click on don't include and choose include from the pop-up menu (that's assuming Snow Leopard engages in the same counterintuitive practice as Leopard of assuming that though you've just included the System files attribute you don't want to make use of it).

You can also find mailboxes without including System files by selecting File Extension as the attribute and typing mbox in the text box, or by navigating to ~/Library and searching for the mailbox by name.

I think you would need to upgrade to Lion where you can search within mail for Mailbox names (including Folders). Double-check by using the search field in your version of Mail to see if it shows a result when you search for a Mail folder.

Otherwise, the problem you're having then is it's just not tracking mail "folders" to be found within mail. Even under Lion, the Mail folders don't show under spotlight... only in Mail itself.



Think of it like folders in other apps like your Safari bookmarks. While it may look like a folder, doesn't necessarily mean it's a folder in the finder or something that can be searched on outside the app itself. By "message metadata form", I was referring to search for an email or an attachment to the email in spotlight and the result sends you to that message in Mail itself rather than sending you to the actual file in the Finder.



I previously mentioned how to do that and dkmarsh has now followed up with detailed steps that should help, but in the end it'll just show you in the Finder and not it Mail itself where the folder / mbox is.



As was mentioned if the word importer is not installed properly that would affect the ability to search by content of word files. Also make sure spotlight is not blocked form the folders where the documents are stored via the system preferences.

You cannot disable journaling on the boot volume or on your Time Machine volume. That's why the button would be disabled for such volumes.

But as mentioned by others, journaling has nothing to do with Spotlight. Journaling is insurance for the files that make up your directory. What may seem to the user to be a single simple change (for example, renaming a file) may actually be a whole series of updates to the directory (delete the old file while remembering its location on disk and other metadata, then create a file with the new name but referring to the old location and metadata. If adding the new name requires splitting a block in the B*tree in the file catalog, a new block has to be taken from the free blocks list, information needs to be copied to it to turn one over-full block into two half-full blocks, the new block has to be linked in, and the free blocks list needs to be updated. etc.)

The danger is that your computer may fail right in the middle of that (loss of power, system fault, etc.), leaving the catalog in very bad shape. To counter that, all the changes are written to the journal first, then applied to the catalog. If the computer crashes, it can check the journal when it comes back up to see what, if anything, it was in the middle of when it crashed, and can finish the job.

The useful lifetime of information in the journal is measured in seconds at most. Indeed, the journal is only actually read from when recovering from a crash. It never needs to be "rebuilt".

Didn't see anything out of the ordinary with your other output. I do observe there that two Microsoft importers exist... but i really have no idea if that's 'right' or 'wrong' (or acceptable or exceptional or what). Perhaps the Entourage import features are also covered by the Office importer. Perhaps that wouldn't matter anyway. (dunno)

Somehow, your problem probably runs deeper. Sorry to keep tossing terminal commands at you, but i'm hoping to see if anything unusual sticks out...

mdutil -s -a

^ to see what Spotlight considers the indexing status of all mounted volumes to be.

And...

ps axcu |sed '1p;/ md/!d'

^ to see which metadata processes are up and running.

[Standard "I'm running OS X 10.5.8" caveat applies to this response.]

I can disable journaling on the boot volume by option-clicking the File menu, as Jon suggests above:



Once journaling is disabled, the button becomes enabled as expected. (In Leopard, anyway, the button doesn't seem to toggle between the two actions, even for non-boot volumes, despite the fact that delving into Disk Utility's package contents reveals

/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/Frameworks/DUSupport.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DisableJournal.tiff

as well as EnableJournal.tiff. )

> I can disable journaling on the boot volume by option-clicking the File menu, as Jon suggests above:

I'm offered the option to disable journaling on all volumes, bootable or not, in 10.6.8.

Yes, me too.

I don't know if this is useful information or not.....but I don't use Entourage and don't even have it installed on my machine. The installation of the importer would have been a Microsoft decision, not mine.


No problem at all. It only takes a moment and I'm glad to do it. Here are the current results:

I entered:

mdutil -s -a

and got:

/Volumes/Time Machine:
Indexing enabled.
/:
Indexing enabled.
/Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb:
Indexing enabled.
firstname-lastnames-imac:~ myname$


I entered:

ps axcu |sed '1p;/ md/!d'

and got:

firstname-lastnames-imac:~ myname$ ps axcu |sed '1p;/ md/!d'
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
myname 671 0.0 0.8 2475488 16104 ?? SNs 4:01am 0:00.35 mdworker
root 28 0.0 6.2 3360504 130496 ?? Ss 9:45pm 0:05.85 mds
firstname-lastnames-imac:~ myname$

Thank you. I have got this far and found that the long list already has a default of 8 items checked off, one of which is "System Files".



"In Menu" is not available to me as a checkbox, and there is no checkbox with "Menu" in the name. The only reference to "In Menu" is one of the sort functions at the top of the window.


Thank you for that and I will store it away. However, looking for a mail folder using a search function is not something I'd do often and, in this case, my concern is that an attempt to do so seems to have uncovered a problem with Spotlight in other kinds of searches.

I do not like Spotlight.

I have several external USB hard drives, all of them formatted Mac OS Extended and GUID. On one of those external hard drives, Spotlight has NEVER been able to reliably find files by name or by content. Sometimes, files which are sitting right there in an open Finder window do not show up in a Spotlight search and I have never been able to figure out why.

I have tried everything. I've used Spotlight's privacy setting to stop and then redo indexing of the drive. I have used the Terminal to manually delete the Spotlight index files. I've verified the disk with Disk Utility. I've tried it with Preserve Permissions both on and off. Absolutely nothing I have tried has made Spotlight work reliably on that disk, and I have never seen or heard a plausible explanation of why.

I have EasyFind, and the *only* thing I use it for is searching that particular drive.

I'm not a fan of EasyFind. I find its user interface to be muddled and poorly designed, and I often end up frustrated when I search for files by content that it will grind and grind and produce no results, and then I'll look and see that I had some setting wrong--usually, I haven't clicked on Advanced and specified the file extensions for the files I want to search. (By default, it will not search by content in Word files. You have to manually add .doc and .docx in order to make it do so.)

> (By default, it will not search by content in Word files. You have to manually add .doc and .docx in order to make it do so.)

Thanks for that... I added xls to EasyFind's search settings, and it found my Excel spreadsheets.

(Also, I noticed that "mbox" files are optional...their "selection" box needs to be checked.)

It seems to me that you already have 8 items including 'System files' in the 'Kind' pulldown menu. There are two ways to select such search attributes from the 'Other' popup window in the Searching "This Mac" window. One is to select/highlight an entire item line by clicking on it, the other by checking the box behind it. This box is located in the 3rd column headed 'In Menu', which doesn't just serve a sort function. As you yourself said in your post (marked in red above), there are already 8 items checked off.

Upgrade to Lion is not in the cards for me as I require Rosetta. However, as suggested I have now double-checked the Find functions in Mail and found a curious (to me) anomaly.

Mail (V4.5) has two search functions - the standard one in the Menu Bar that all applications have (within Help) and another that can be placed in the Tool Bar.

A search using the Tool Bar help will generate mail documents that contain the key word(s) but not the Mailbox. However, the mailbox can be located by clicking on "Show In Mailbox".

The Search function, within Help on the Menu Bar, is quite different. The key word(s) not only locate the Mailbox but also have a floating blue arrow pointing to it.

I wonder why the Mail-specific search function wouldn't also be structured to find Mailboxes, if someone has written the code anyway for the Help search function....unless that's what you mean Lion does.


That would be beyond my ability to ascertain....and may be the reason Jon has suggested a system reinstall may be in order.


It isn't. All boxes are checked and the only changes I've made there is in the order of the search items.

The Toolbar search is not a Help search, however yes this is where you can search for mailboxes in Lion as well as the usual email contents although it only refines your search instead of revealing it's location.

The reason the Help menu search finds it is because your mailboxes are shown in the menus under Message -> Move to and Message -> Copy to

The floating blue arrow is an standard indicator when you search help for an existing menu item.

So, if you just want to move or a copy an email to the folder, then perhaps the help search would be your best option.

Did you see tacit's post regarding Word docs and my response, in which I noted that EasyFind now finds my Excel spreadsheets and that if you click on "Settings" in EF's menu bar you'll see a box to check that will get it to find your .mbox files?

Yes, I did and thanks to both of you.

Now, I remain wondering why Spotlight isn't doing the kind of searches it once did (i.e. it no longer finds Word documents from text in the documents) and if Kevin's thought "....if the word importer is not installed properly that would affect the ability to search by content of word files..." means I need to do something like a system re-install, as Jon recommended.

How's that for a run-on sentence?

A full re-install is not something I'm anxious to do, in case something goes terribly awry. However, if something's not working right...

> A full re-install is not something I'm anxious to do, in case something goes terribly awry. However, if something's not working right...

I've got no idea whether you need to re-install or not, but as long as you're fully backed up, nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong.

Seriously, though: As long as you're fully backed up, a re-install, if necessary, should be painless.