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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.
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
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.
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
FYI, there's a new release of Mojave - v10.14.5. Microsoft L2 support says:
*"*I had a user reporting that the issue had been fixed in Mac OSX 10.14.5, yesterday. Can we try updating to the same and check if that makes the difference?"
So I updated and will keep an eye on things. Fingers crossed.
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 ...