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

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-05-16T18:18:00+00:00

    closing and re-opening did help. It seems to be working now. We'll see how long it last this time

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-05-16T18:08:34+00:00

    How frustrating! I haven’t yet found email that doesn’t properly appear in search results sobce i upgraded to 10.14.5 and deleted/re-added my email accounts. But its inly been a day or two. I’ll post here if the problem re-appears for me.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-05-16T17:53:31+00:00

    ok it worked for a few seconds and then it stopped. It was actually working for new emails, and then I removed the account, added it again, wait until the indexing finished and it's not working any more

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-05-16T16:42:30+00:00

    My understanding is that the upgrade to 10.14.5 (supposedly) fixes the problem going forward. But if you already have mail that doesn't show up in search results, it may not fix that legacy issue. (I can't swear to this, but I think it's right).

    Deleting and re-adding the mail account seemed to make all the mail in that account searchable. So did selecting a folder, right-clicking, and selecting Repair folder. (The former will reindex the entire account whereas the latter reindexes that single folder (by deleting and downloading fresh from the server).

    Perhaps the combination of upgrading to 10.14.5 for ongoing and deleting/adding account or folder for historical is the answer.

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-05-16T14:50:29+00:00

    I just updated to 10.14.5 but unfortunately the problem persist.

    The weird part is that after doing the re-indexing now I'm able to search through the spotlight, but not within the outlook

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