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
    2019-04-18T07:56:45+00:00

    I'm getting the exact same search issue, as well as a blank outlook Outlook Search Repair tool.

    Running 16.24 on Mojave - routinely have to rebuild my search index and can never find emails. As this is a primary work email account search functionality is an absolute priority! At the moment I have to use the web interface to find emails, which is frankly ridiculous

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-04-15T16:57:58+00:00

    Thanks yobelow.  It's a tricky thing to try to fix for our users because it takes a pretty specific search query to actually reveal that there is an issue but we are trying to nail down what specific circumstances cause this issue to occur.

    Also, why hasn't Microsoft Support addressed the issue with the blank Outlook Search Repair tool window in Mojave?  Seems like something they would be aware of and fixing.  Mojave has been out since September 2018

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-04-15T16:40:43+00:00

    This same problem happened to me periodically with a range of different Outlook builds and MacOS versions. I could never definitively nail down why it happened, but my suspicion was that it happened when Outlook wasn't closed gracefully.

    The solution was always to run 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 always resolved the issue. 

    But mdimport -g is not supported under MacOS 10.14.4 (Mojave), so I no longer have a fix. I'd recommend to everyone not to upgrade to Mojave until a fix is available. When using earlier MacOS versions, the problem is fixable using the above-mentioned process. I cannot say definitively which versions of Outlook it worked with, but it worked with every version I ever tried it with.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-04-15T16:20:02+00:00

    This is still happening to users in our org and it is completely unacceptable.  Is there any word on if this is specifically being addressed?  Also has anyone else with the issue nail down the exact scenario in which this issue pops up ie Outlook build + MacOS version being factors?

    I'm curious to see if this is happening to anyone running the 16.23 build of Outlook on older version of macOS 10.12 or 10.13

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-04-12T07:35:38+00:00

    Hi yobelow,

    Thanks for posting back and sharing the useful information in our community. If you have any further updates on this problem, welcome to post back again.

    Thanks,

    Huni

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