Fernanda Foertter

Spotlight woes..

Two weeks ago my Apple Mail Smart Folders stopped working. I figured my mailbox was corrupted or something. So I deleted some inbox files and let is resync with the server. 70k messages later, still not working.

I depend a lot on Spotlight to search for my files. So when I couldn’t get results on Spotlight I realized the issue was greater. Turns out Mail search depends on Spotlight’s indexing!

Anyway, here are all the things I tried:

Rebooting
Safe mode reboot
Deleting /.Spotlight* files on main volume 
Relaunching MDS Launch Daemons
Starting and Stopping indexing using mdutil (Kept getting /: Error: unknown indexing state.)

Doing the last three in Safe Mode 
Reinstall OS via Recovery

None of these worked. Here’s what did work. I finally read in some google result to look for more mds processes….so

$> sudo launchctl list | grep meta
2243 0 com.apple.metadata.mds

Oohhhh you mean some things haven’t launched and or died, why didn’t you just say so?… ugh.

$> sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.*
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.spindump.plist: Could not find specified service
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.index.plist: Could not find specified service
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.scan.plist: Could not find specified service

Yep

$> sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.*
$> sudo launchctl list | grep meta 
2596 0 com.apple.metadata.mds.scan
2595 0 com.apple.metadata.mds.index
2594 0 com.apple.metadata.mds
– 0 com.apple.metadata.mds.spindump

Ok, not sure why the last one doens’t have a pid but whatever….

$> sudo mdutil -as
/:
 Indexing enabled.

Praise the Daemons! And the logs?

11/30/16 4:56:08.357 PM mds[2594]: (DiskStore.Normal:2382) 4c0db 1.070732
11/30/16 4:56:09.572 PM mds[2594]: (DiskStore.Normal:2382) 4c0db 1.017446
11/30/16 4:56:10.859 PM mds[2594]: (DiskStore.Normal:2382) 4c0db 1.067014

Normal is awesome!