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
    2019-04-18T14:05:43+00:00

    FYI, I installed the 16.24 update yesterday and it did not solve the problem.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-04-26T08:51:08+00:00

    Exact same issues on Mojave and the repair tool showing blank. Thanks @yobelow, your information is more helpful than what MS is providing!

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-04-26T15:34:04+00:00

    FYI, I have been having an ongoing dialog w/ Mac Outlook Support. They have asked me to try a number of things (posted in this thread) that have not resolved the issue. A few days ago, they ask me to generate and send Console and ULS logs, which I did. Presumably, these have been sent to L2 support. I will post any updates as they occur.

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-04-30T12:52:43+00:00

    Deleting the mail account in Outlook then re-adding it seems to resolve the issue for me. Depending on how much mail is on the mail server, it can take a little while for existing mail to download again and get indexed by Spotlight (thus making Outlook search return results). But so far this seems to be working for me.

    (Make sure you know your account passwords before you take this step).

    I don't know if the problem will re-emerge but will monitor and post here if it does. 

    I have no explanation as to why this happened to begin with.

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