MacOS Sonoma: Spotlight Issues - App Indexing

... since upgrading to Sonoma, Spotlight search results are no longer drag-able. hope this gets resolved. thank you

... since upgrading to Sonoma, Spotlight search results (images) are no longer drag-able. hope this gets resolved. thank you

Apple did a really bad ****** of testing the upgrade to Sonoma.

I struggled with this issue for weeks and tried every workaround offered in these forms and elsewhere ( Reddit ) . Nothing worked.

Computer : MacBookPro with an Apple M1 Pro Chip runing Sonoma 14.1.1 Symptoms on my computer :

1. Spotlight totally stopped working
2. Mail search totally busted - Mail always shows status as Indexing

What all i tried unsuccessfully

1. erase and rebuild of Spotlight Index
2. Rebuild Mail Database
3. all the mdUtil Workarounds from Terminal (mdutil -ai off / on etc )
4. login / logoff from icloud

What i discovered

1. The problem is that after the Sonoma installation the secure token got corrupted and i saw "authentication disabled" errors on trying to do admin actions.

What finally fixed the issue Did the following operation from a local admin account

1. sysadminctl -secureTokenOff
2. sysadminctl -secureTokenOn

logged back into my account . Everythign works !

Thank you Apple for killing my productivity and shame on you for not testing this workflow properly , to add ti this so many months after release you dont even have a fix !

I have the same problem with Spotlight, but only with mobile users, Spotlight works perfectly for local users.

If a local user is logged on to my MacBook in the background, Spotlight also works immediately for a mobile user.

Even if I am logged in as a mobile user and log in to the terminal with su- <user> with a local user, Spotlight works immediately.

It seems that something is not activated in MacOS when you are logged in as a mobile user. Maybe someone can do something with this information and find a solution to the problem.

So, Sonoma 14.3.1 and it is happening to me as well.

New fix: Toggle FileVault off and back on (or vice versa). For whatever reason, this seems to fix the Secure Token issue and seems to last weeks, if not months.

well first off, thanks for the insight. I've been dealing with this on an M2Max ever since upgrading to Sonoma. I wanted to add that in my case I believe it's my Yubikey as I've enabled it for login and I am NOT connected to an Enterprise AD account. I believe MacOS treats this similarly to an AD account. The Local admin account turn everything off and back on again fixes the issue. To my surprise if I do a Spotlight search and get no results but leave the search terms in spotlight and then kick the system using local Admin the search will AUTOMAGICALLY populate. Clearly it's an OS level issue, I'm just surprised more people haven't complained. TBH the lack of Spotlight makes the machine almost unusable.

I had the same problem on Sonoma 14.5 and the solution that worked for me was to force kill the corespotlightd process and then re-open the system settings app:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/468984/search-in-system-preferences-pane-stopped-working

Has caused issues for me in mail, notes and spotlight main search.

Its now August, 2 month shy of being a year since first reported, has Apple seriously still not fixed this yet?

Similar problem. For me it was easier.

• Sonoma 14.5
• Search bar in Settings not working, but working everywhere else

opened Terminal, sudo mdutil -E /

Everything worked after that.

This issue continue to return because something is wrong with SecureToken. Turning off and on SecureToken on these AD accounts makes it working for a while but after a while it gets broken again.

Did anyone try on Sequoia or Sonoma 14.7?

I’m still experiencing the same issue with Spotlight on my Mac Mini M2 with macOS Sequoia 15.0. It only returns search results for applications, not files, settings, or emails.

Setup

• Mac Mini M2
• Mobile account authenticated against SAMBA-AD-DC (Active Directory-like)

Workaround

I found a temporary workaround that seems to help:

1. I created a local account (no admin privileges required).
2. Then, I attempted to SSH to localhost using that local account.
3. The SSH connection was rejected for reasons I haven’t yet investigated, but interestingly, after this, Spotlight started functioning normally again.

It seems that a local account needs to log in at least once after every reboot for Spotlight to work correctly. This workaround isn’t ideal, but it might help if you are facing the same issue.

I had the same indexing issues in Ventura - seemed to be after a Mac update. I could add/remove drives and it would reindex and work for a day or two then fail again. Updated to Sonoma thinking it may fix, worked for a day after update and now it fails again. Super frustrating and unproductive to not be able to search in Mail or Messages for things.

The very same problem started to manifest on a basically brand new MacBook Pro M3 on Sonoma and stil persists on Sequoia. It drives me nuts as I'm not able to efficiently work with e-mail. None of the solutions found so far worked for longer than a day or two. This seriously undermines my confidence in MacOS. I use Onedrive and Eset Endpoint Security (company policy), but I doubt all of the people reporting this do as well.