How to fix Outlook for Mac search

Solution 1:

Outlook and macOS's Spotlight (the indexing app) have notorious problems working together. With previous version I had success with the Repair tool that you mention. With Mojave & Outlook 2019, however, I had to try many other methods. This website seems to have the most comprehensive guides for troubleshooting this.

In my case, I finally found that "alternative method 6" from that guide worked. That means:

• Backup!
• Quit Outlook
• Go to the folder ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile/Data (in Finder you can press cmd+shift+G to get there)
• Move the Outlook.sqllite file e.g. to the Desktop (to keep it around until the restore is successful)
• Launch Outlook.
• Outlook will prompt you to repair your database. Click "Repair". Outlook is now forced to restore its database and rebuild the index, etc. In my case this took about 2–3 hours on a speedy MacBook Pro.
• ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/ will contain backups of your previous database. To free some disk space you may want to archive or delete this.

Solution 2:

Most answer here are rather heavy-handed. The link provided by OP has apparently been updated and now suggests to reset the Spotlight index for the Outlook folder. This is a much less intrusive solution, takes about 20 minutes of rebuild time, and often works. Therefore, I would recommend to everybody to first try this method.

Quote from the Microsoft support article [with additions by myself]:

1. Choose Apple menu, then System Preferences, and then Spotlight.

2. Select the Privacy tab.

3. In Finder:

   a. On the Go menu, select Go to Folder...

   b. Copy and paste the following location into the "Go to the folder:" dialog box and select Go:

   ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/

4. Drag the "Main Profile" folder to the Privacy tab. Once added, remove the folder [from the Spotlight privacy tab], and Spotlight will re-index the folder.

You must perform this step for any additional profile folders you have.

See the following article from Apple to learn more: How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac.

After that macOS will rebuild the index for that folder, which will take a while (up to an hour approximately) depending on your Mac's speed and the size of your Outlook database.

If you suspect that there is a more severe issue with Spotlight, have a look at this answer on how to reset Spotlight completely. Again this is a rather drastic measure and may take a few hours to rebuild.

Solution 3:

We do two things when this happens:

1. Validate that search works for us in the online version of outlook (we use O365 for our exchange servers so YMMV if you don't). If you can't find it on Micsosoft's servers - then the mailbox content itself has issues.
2. Validate that the search fails in Outlook and in spotlight and then works in both immediately (or after 5 minutes if your outlook store is large and indexing into spotlight takes more than a minute to complete).

When you're sure the online search works and the local search is failing, you can be sure of one of four things:

1. The importer that Outlook adds to the system so that spotlight knows how to index mails is broken / crashy / and needs an update. Contact Microsoft for assistance.
2. The mail that user has (some attachment, some calendar invite, some mail) is corrupt and if you find and delete those specific data files - the indexer will stop crashing or being corrupt or incomplete.
3. This just was bad luck and the index stopped one time and you won't have to run the repair tool again in a day or week or month.
4. Your Mac has storage or stability issues with the filesystem or spotlight in general. If this is the case, you should be able to find other things like file name search that are broken or Disk Utility telling you that the disk needs repair / erase / reinstallation.

There will be lots of other things to try to attack the "bad luck" case above like emptying the mail cache (which tell spotlight to forget all the results and causes all the mail to be redownloaded from the server that it thinks it needs a local cache), but doesn't address the fundamental mechanism for search. Outlook uses spotlight and modifies spotlight with its custom plug in to handle the data format for Outlook data when it's stored on the local disk.

Solution 4:

I tried everything and in my case the only thing that solved the issue was selecting the New Outlook option from the top right of Mac Outlook. After that, Outlook relaunched with the new look and also Search now works.

Mac mini M1 with Big Sur. Outlook for Mac 16.45.

Hope this helps.