Outlook 16.23.1 not searching correctly on Mojave 10.14.4

Anonymous
2019-04-04T21:28:30+00:00

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.

Outlook | MacOS | Legacy Outlook for Mac | For home

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.

0 comments

51 answers

Sort by: Newest
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2019-10-22T21:18:47+00:00

    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 hoped your solution was helping me, but I didn't.

    I have also the problem after using time machine.

    I have move the MainProfile folder and put it back.

    Went back to outlook and .... nothing happend.

    It is really customer unfriendly from Microsoft to not help paying customers.

    Especially the fact that they know about the problem from nov 2018.

    Really unacceptable.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2019-10-22T20:59:01+00:00

    I get so tiered of the Microsoft solution. 

    It is always delete everything and then it may work.

    Is it so hard to create software that can be fixed without dropping the problem by the user.

    Who has to fix install or configure al kinds of things himself.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2019-08-27T16:40:40+00:00

    Finally... Exporting worked for me as well. Mac Outlook 16.16.13, Mojave 10.14.6 (18G95). My search is working again.

    Thank you

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2019-08-15T10:46:47+00:00

    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 !

    Was this answer helpful?

    7 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  5. Anonymous
    2019-08-02T20:38:23+00:00

    The same hit me from a time-machine restore to a new mac air. All of the things in various threads didn't work (in the past have always used mdimport when this occurred). Until today, now working. The two main deltas:

    1. Updated to Mojave 10.14.6. Even though that didn't seem to have an immediate impact (incl. after usual of dragging ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/ to Spotlight/Privacy, then removing - after watching for the mds task in activity monitor to 'finish', and still hours after that, searching in outlook 2016 gave no results,
    2. At that point was preparing to uninstall and reinstall Office. Needed to archive a local folder in outlook (itself an 'archive' of past emails), and so set all emails in that to the same category (yellow etc), to then export this category to a .olm archive, to bring this back in (import) after the reinstall. This took a while, and I wonder if this was possibly the reason search is now working. Another thread mentions a metadata attribute on emails that's changed in Mojave (kMDItemKind is being set to "Document" in Mojave and "olk15_message" in High Sierra), and whether using a category on some email, combined with exporting (which would search all emails for that category) somehow also updated this metadata attribute (on all emails) to what Mojave needs/uses. 

    Anyway, after a week of wrestling with this, search seems to be working for me, finally.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments