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I've had intermittent problems where the search function in Outlook on my Mac would stop working. In the past, I had a reliable fix that I found somewhere online; I ran the following in Terminal:
mdimport -g ‘/Applications/Microsoft Outlook.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Outlook Spotlight Importer.mdimporter’ -d1 ‘/Users/USERNAME/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile’
... where USERNAME was the home directory name on my Mac. This took a while to run, but worked like a charm every time.
But I recently upgraded to Mac OS 10.14.4 (Mojave), and apparently this command is no longer supported in Terminal. Now when I try to run it, I get the error:
'-g' no longer supported. Importers may only be tested by installing them.
To be honest, I don't really know what the "-g" parameter means. Any ideas on how to resolve? I'm a bit out of my depth here and don't want to do something that makes things worse.
Using older versions of Outlook for Mac for personal email and calendar
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
I tried all of the steps mentioned here, and also some steps on other sites. Nothing worked.
So, as a last ditch effort, I dragged the "MainProfile" folder out of the "Outlook 15 Profiles" and put it on the desktop.
Then waited about 2 seconds, then dragged it back into the "Outlook 15 Profiles" folder.
Immediately fixed the problem.
Hope this helps.
I interacted with MS's dedicated Outlook for Mac support team via the Contact Support feature on the Help menu in Outlook. I was told to do the following,
Quit Outlook completely and then open Terminal on the Mac and then copy and paste the command
sudo mdutil -E /
It would prompt for your Mac Password please enter it and wait for it to complete and then give it some time and then re-launch Outlook and check if that helps. If you still face issues.
Quit Outlook completely by click on Outlook Menu > Quit Outlook and then try the steps
1. Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Spotlight.
2. Click the Privacy tab.
3. In Finder:
a. On the Go menu click Go to Folder...
b. Copy and paste the following location into the "Go to the folder:" dialog box and click 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, and Spotlight will re-index the folder. Note: You must perform this step for any additional profile folders you may have.
See the following article from Apple to learn more: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716
This appeared to work - messages were appearing in search results. But unfortunately, the fix was short-lived. Newer mail is still not appearing in search results. (I can be looking at a message just received in my inbox, search for it, and get no results). So there's still a problem. But at least I temporarily have some kind of search capability.
I have posted this back to the Outlook Support team and will update this thread if they respond with helpful suggestions.
I tried all of the steps mentioned here, and also some steps on other sites. Nothing worked.
So, as a last ditch effort, I dragged the "MainProfile" folder out of the "Outlook 15 Profiles" and put it on the desktop.
Then waited about 2 seconds, then dragged it back into the "Outlook 15 Profiles" folder.
Immediately fixed the problem.
Hope this helps.
THIS IS THE FIX!!!! Hours and hours, deleting this, reinstalling that.....
Do EXACTLY what Giles says...voilà!!!
System: Catalina 10.15.2, Mac Outlook 16.33
What caused my issue? Migrating to new Mac from Time Machine.
Hey Guys, same here, we have 160 Mac Clients and this happened every month to one of ours. then we used the same terminal prompt like yobelow sucessfully but now at 10.14 it doensn't work anymore ...
I suspect the -g option was really only for importer plug-in testing, and shouldn't have been part of the original instructions.
This resolved my Outlook index issues:
mdimport ~/Library/Group\ Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook\ 15\ Profiles/Main\ Profile
It's so easy... Gilles you should be awarded for such a genius idea! I did your solution 10 min ago and e-mails begin to appear (juste before, no results whatever I did)... I'm with Mojave 10.14.6 and spotlight became blind in Outlook after I had to erase my HD and work from Time Machine after a cyber-attack...
Congratulations from Paris !