In an Apple Mail search, should I be worried about unrelated results?

September 7, 2019 2:30 PM

In trying to establish a timeline for an upcoming divorce mediation, I searched my ex-spouse's surname on my iPad and got many additional random hits across a couple of accounts - messages that have nothing to do with her. She's not cc'd or mentioned but is it possible I could be sharing info through some forgotten iCloud functionality?
posted by bonobothegreat to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

This sounds odd. I think we need more information. Are you searching from inside the email app? If not, how are you doing the search? In general, can you provide some more details?
posted by alex1965 at 12:19 PM on September 8, 2019

I've noticed similarly odd results in both Spotlight & Mail.app (which seems to use Spotlight) for a while now - search terms not finding stuff I know is there, searches returning completely unrelated stuff, etc.

Your question has just prompted me to delete the Spotlight database & re-index. So far it seems to have solved some of the issues - at least some stuff it couldn't find before is now found - but it's still re-indexing. Let's see if it also solves the unrelated results issues too…
posted by Pinback at 6:14 PM on September 8, 2019

Update: Rebuilding the Spotlight index - as outlined here - seems to have worked for me. Spotlight & Mail.app searches that were returning no/spurious results now seem to be accurate.

Of course, there's always the possibility that other search terms are now broken or inaccurate, but we'll see how it goes…
posted by Pinback at 7:08 PM on September 8, 2019 [1 favorite]