OS X’s Mail program has a built-in way to help resolve issues with garbled messages or with emails not appearing when you search for them. This option is available under the Mailbox menu—it’s at the bottom, labeled “Rebuild.”
May 03, 2019 If you start noticing that your Mac’s Mail app always downloading and is continuously or frequently showing a message that it’s “Downloading Messages,” you are not alone. Both OSX and macOS users report this problem with their Mail app. Luckily, some fixes do the trick and get your Mac’s. Jun 26, 2017 Rebuild Mailboxes in Apple Mail solves most of the problems with Apple Mail. And also, after sometime, the mailboxes can become heavy and start causing issues. Rebuilding removes any kind of corrupt or damaged files that can be present inside profile folders. Mar 11, 2012 Updating search index of Office 2011 for Mac Hi, I had migrate from number of Windows.pst mail files to Outlook for Mac 2011. And have just realize that all this messages are not indexed by search engine. Only new ones that received on Mac are indexed. Please guide me how to search in imported messages. Dec 24, 2018 Are you facing email not sending problem where email from Mac Mail Stuck in Outbox? Some Mac users who updated Mac Mail experience some trouble to send an email like Mac Mail emails remain stuck in Outbox. Re-index or Rebuild Apple Mail Mailboxes – Manual Method. The process of re-indexing is quite similar to the process of rebuilding. However, there is little bit different. In case, after the automatically rebuilding, the problem in Apple Mail persists, then it is important to re-index or rebuild Apple Mail mailboxes in.
If you pick any mailbox from the sidebar and then choose that, Mail will attempt to, well, rebuild the mailbox, which can help with all sorts of display problems and emails that seem to be missing.
Note that if the mailbox in question has a ton of messages, this process can take a while. You can monitor the progress by choosing
And one more thing, as Apple notes in their support article on the topic:
When you rebuild mailboxes for IMAP or Exchange accounts, messages and attachments stored on your computer are discarded, and then downloaded again from the mail server to your Mac. Your mailbox appears empty until the download is complete.Manual Reindex Of Mac Mail Free
I’ve also found that you may have to select a different mailbox and then click back on the one that’s rebuilt to see that mailbox’s content after the process is complete, or you can quit Mail and reopen it to do the same thing. But after that, you should see a new and improved version of the misbehaving mailbox. If the issue still isn’t resolved, though, be sure to check out my tip from 2014 on solving Mail searching problems. You’ll have to adjust the steps a bit if you’re running a newer version of the operating system, though; where I give the path as “~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData” toward the end of the article, you’ll want to change that to “~/Library/Mail/V3/MailData.” Silly Apple, changing things up and making my old tips obsolete.
You may need to rebuild a mailbox to update the list of messages it contains. For example, if messages appear to be missing or garbled, or if you can’t find all relevant messages when you search using the Entire Message search option.
In the Mail app on your Mac, select a mailbox in the Mail sidebar.
Choose Mailbox > Rebuild.
Manual Reindex Of Mac Mail Download
When you rebuild mailboxes for IMAP or Exchange accounts, messages and attachments stored on your computer are discarded, and then downloaded again from the mail server to your Mac. Your mailbox appears empty until the download is complete.