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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.
Yes it's kin of annoying not having the search working and is interesting that microsoft knowing this issues since nov, and having a lot of people complaining about this hasn't fix it yet.
I'm re-indexing now, will se how long it last, if it works at all
Apparently, Outlook uses Spotlight for indexing and search functions. So even though the search is inside Outlook and it looks like Outlook is doing the searching, Outlook is really using Spotlight. Spotlight is supposed to index all readable content on your Mac.
For some reason, mail in Outlook stops getting indexed by Spotlight, and thus stops appearing in search results in Outlook (because it's not in the Spotlight index).
Deleting the mail account in Outlook, then re-adding and waiting for the mail to get indexed is the only thing that has worked for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't work permanently; after a while, some mail doesn't get indexed again and isn't searchable. But it worked for me for a while as a temp hack fix.
If you're running 10.14, it's an Outlook bug, and so searching in Outlook (regardless of the health of the underlying Spotlight index) will only work intermittently, if at all, until Microsoft fixes the problem in Outlook. As an earlier poster mentioned, the problem is documented here, has been an issue since November 2018, and is not yet fixed.
Until they fix this, I've abandoned all searching in Outlook and instead I'm using the web-based client (I'm on O365) to search. I'd recommend using whatever web-based client you have to your email to do the same, or risk inaccurate search results (usually stuff is just missing).
Apparently, Outlook uses Spotlight for indexing and search functions. So even though the search is inside Outlook and it looks like Outlook is doing the searching, Outlook is really using Spotlight. Spotlight is supposed to index all readable content on your Mac.
For some reason, mail in Outlook stops getting indexed by Spotlight, and thus stops appearing in search results in Outlook (because it's not in the Spotlight index).
Deleting the mail account in Outlook, then re-adding and waiting for the mail to get indexed is the only thing that has worked for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't work permanently; after a while, some mail doesn't get indexed again and isn't searchable. But it worked for me for a while as a temp hack fix.
I tried all the solutions suggested in the thread and nothing is working for me.
I tried adding the Profile folder to the Privacy Tab and remove it, but nothing changed after that. How is Spotlight related to the search functionality within the Outlook? What's not working for me is the search inside the outlook, I never use spotlight to search for emails
After I told the Outlook Support team about the fix by deleting and re-adding the mail account, they said I should monitor this page for a resolution of the problem ...
I'm not that optimistic, however, given that this page indicates they've been aware of the problem since 11/20/18 and there have been no updates wrt resolution.
Also, note that when you delete and re-add your email accounts, if the account is gmail account and you re-add it as Type Google (vs. imap), rules will no longer work.
Here's a list of all the features not supported if using Google accounts with outlook.