mail fail

It is OK that the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion version of Mail.app takes an hour to upgrade my few-hundred-thousand-message mail database from the old 10.6 version.

It is not OK that the database regularly becomes corrupted in such a way that the search feature silently fails to function, necessitating a repeat of this hour-long process every few weeks.

When Mail.app's search function stops working -- no longer allowing a search on criteria other than 'message contains' and no longer finding the messages that do match -- this is the only procedure I know that fixes it:

    
    [mason@IT-PC-MACPRO-01 ~]$ cd ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/
    [mason@IT-PC-MACPRO-01 MailData]$ rm Envelop*
    

This works every time[1], but it has the lousy side-effect of rendering Mail completely unusable for the hour-plus time it takes to recreate all the index files.

Wah, bitch, moan, etc.

[1]: Except this one time, where Spotlight itself was broken, and any app using Spotlight failed weirdly. That time, even mdls on the command line yielded the message:

    
    The Spotlight Server is disabled.
    

Rebooting (grr) cleared it up, though.

Keywords: Milk in the batter, milk in the batter, Mail.app sucks and that's what's the matter