Spotlight search pops up in Mail

[HCHTech]

I've got a elderly customer with an older iMac (Early 2008) running Yosemite. Despite being ancient, it runs fine. For some reason, Spotlight search is popping up when you are in the Mail app, but only in one of the two user accounts on the machine. Not immediately, but if you open a few emails, you'll get it pretty consistently within a few minutes.

I did a cleanup & such with Onyx, and a scan with Malwarebytes. A handful of pups were found and deleted without incident. None of this affected the Spotlight problem, unfortunately.

As a test, I have tried unticking all of the various Spotlight options in system preferences, including removing the keyboard shortcut. I also removed spotlight suggestions from the location services applet in Security & Privacy.

I suppose I could disable the Spotlight server with a terminal command, but that sounds like it would break other things.

None of this seems to have affected the problem. I'm still getting Spotlight randomly popping up when I'm in the Mail app. This has to be either configuration or malware since it only affects one user account - doesn't it?

 

[Markverhyden]

Did you specifically empty the Spolight cache. I've had a few cases where Spotlight was wonky and that seemed to work.

Open terminal - sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/*

WARNING - check you entry twice. sudo rm -rf, misused, is catastrophic.

 

[HCHTech]

I can give that a try. Gee, Apple, how about a nice little "clear cache" button somewhere?

 

[Markverhyden]

I can give that a try. Gee, Apple, how about a nice little "clear cache" button somewhere?

They are all like that. I keep on having problems with M$ and all of the update garbage it keeps in the winsxs folder with VM's Trying to keep the drives as small as possible and they keep on running out of space.

Latest Apple. Got a customer who's Bluetooth Mouse disconnects/reconnects dozens of times a day. Did a bunch of stuff, no change. Further investigation I find they have specialized tools available, Hardware IO tools, to deal with BT problems. Well hidden inside Apple's Developer site.

By the way make sure to restart after to get the new db build to start.

 

[HCHTech]

M$ and all of the update garbage it keeps in the winsxs folder

I've seen this plenty of times. Really MS? We need to keep 20GB of crap in that folder? I check this before swapping to an SSD if I'm not doing a N&P. Here is my evernote on "Winsxs folder too large"

=============
From an elevated command prompt
Recommended fix (still allows uninstall of updates after cleanup)

Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

Most agressive cleanup (can't uninstall existing updates or service packs after cleanup)

dism/online/Cleanup-Image/StartComponentCleanup/ResetBase
=============