I’m trying to search for numbers in Mail but it doesn’t find anything. Is it possible to get Mail to find numbers also?
(the numbers works as unique identification of different content, it’s not meta data of the emails)
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I can search for numbers within the message body of messages in Mail on macOS 11.6. Is it possible that the body of the emails you are searching for is not HTML or plain text? Mail search looks into the raw source of the message – take a look at one of the emails and use View > Message > Raw Source to investigate just what that message looks like to Mail.
Yes, I can search within one email but I can’t search across all emails. I don’t see the logic of how it works … and I discovered that it’s not only numbers. I searched for a text string and got a few hits, they were messages that were base64 encoded and HTML emails. But a plain text message that I sent to myself (from another account) doesn’t show up. When did another search, a number, then no messages showed up despite that there are at least three messages with that number and they are in base64 and plain text.
I just don’t see the logic here, any info about this would be greatly appreciated … it certainly explains why I haven’t been able to find emails.
Try putting the number in " ". That works for me. 
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I have no problem searching for numbers in Mail 12.4 (Mojave). Stab in the dark but maybe this will help?
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Thanks to both @gem and @WayneG for the suggestions but Mail still doesn’t find the emails. However, I booted up my work laptop - haven’t used it for quite some time - and tried the same thing there. So apparently this is a problem local to my desktop machine. Unless someone have a better suggestion I will try to delete the mail accounts and set up them again to see if that helps.