Indexing problems Outlook - Windows 11

Outlook Search not showing recent emails after Windows update KB5008212 STATUS: Resolved. Really? Are you kidding us? Or you think we're stupid?

For me this is really ridiculous - flagship system - Win11, flagship and paid MS365 and Outlook search doesn't work properly for, attention, SEVEN months! Shame on you Microsoft! I will not buy this subscription anymore, will work on Gmail client, everything slowly moving to the web, because desktop software IS DEAD now. Nobody want to fix it, nobody cares about us, this is truth, we should realize about that.

Launch Outlook and the Indexing status (in Privacy / Searching Windows).

Then try this admin command: NET stop wsearch. If it fails, retry. It will stop the indexer, that will restart automatically.

You should observe the pending items grow, then diminish, and the indexed items number grow.

You may need to redo a few times.

That way, I managed to "force" the indexer to complete its job. Strange and irritating, but I did not find a better way (and rebuilding the index from scratch is not a solution as it gets stuck at some point).

Thank you for your attempts to help, Gabriel. Whilst I do have an Office Subscription, despite many attempts, I have not be able to find a way to open an App ticket, despite looking at Help and Contact Support. I can tell you though that my OS Version is 10.0.22000 Build 22000.

John L G

Things went from bad to worse for me more than two weeks ago now, when indexing slowed to a crawl. I have had it running for just under 15 days, non stop and so far it says that it has only indexed 149 items in all that time. With more than 300,000 items to index, hell is likely to freeze over before it completes, unless Microsoft can fix their problem. I gave up that effort and attempted another rebuild (one of many). The one thing that I have been able to note that whilst I can stop indexing, my Task Manager is telling me that Microsoft Windows Search Indexer is still whirring away and is recording that it is using anywhere between 6% to 15% and mostly around 10% CPU usage on my computer running with 16GB of RAM

It has got to the stage where I have to seriously consider jumping ship and take the plunge and switch to Apple. John L G

Thank you for your attempts to help, Gabriel. Whilst I do have an Office Subscription, despite many attempts, I have not be able to find a way to open an App ticket, despite looking at Help and Contact Support. I can tell you though that my OS Version is 10.0.22000 Build 22000.

John L G

Hi John I was able to create a ticket by using Help in Outlook and Contacting Support. Explained the problem and forgot about it. Few days later I noticed I had a reply asking for more information and eventually I had to upload 15GB of debugging log. Again a long wait and eventually I got a reply saying there was this known bug with indexing on some machines. My ticket was then passed on to the ‘development team’ and then closed. Apparently a fix is being worked on and the issue will be solved in one of the monthly Win11 updates. ‘But probably not the next one’!!

There seems to be some conflict between Win11 searchindexer and Outlook indexing but I can’t believe it’s taking over 7 months now to fix it.

The ‘temporary’ fix workaround via an edit to the registry. Seems to allow searchindex to complete but completely buggers up outlook search which is the main thing I need working !!