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
    2019-05-10T16:41:27+00:00

    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

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-05-13T17:18:29+00:00

    Hey Guys, same here, we have 160 Mac Clients and this happened every month to one of ours. then we used the same terminal prompt like yobelow sucessfully but now at 10.14 it doensn't work anymore and the search repair tool is still blank. very frustrating. thanks @yobelow for the invested time and i hope microsoft will do something about it -.-

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-05-13T18:00:03+00:00

    As of this morning, I was informed the issue was being escalated w/in Outlook Support. Will post anything useful that comes back.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-05-13T19:48:52+00:00

    Hey Guys, same here, we have 160 Mac Clients and this happened every month to one of ours. then we used the same terminal prompt like yobelow sucessfully but now at 10.14 it doensn't work anymore ...

    I suspect the -g option was really only for importer plug-in testing, and shouldn't have been part of the original instructions.

    This resolved my Outlook index issues: 

    mdimport ~/Library/Group\ Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook\ 15\ Profiles/Main\ Profile

    • Dave

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-05-14T15:16:33+00:00

    From Microsoft this morning ...

    "Hi, my name is xxxxxxxx from the escalations team. I will be assisting you further with this concern. Thank you for providing the requested log files. I have checked your conversation with the previous technician and it's unfortunate that you are still facing the search issue. I would like to inform you that we have noticed multiple reports about this issue on 10.14.14 OS. I am consulting this issue with the engineering team. I will get back to you as soon as I get an update. Requesting your patience with us. Thanks."

    The wheels appear to be grinding forward ...

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