Indexing problems Outlook - Windows 11

Hi - yes this index issue is a right pain!

There are two sets of indexes that are reported - one from WIN11 which indexes all your files, documents etc and you can see this in Settings/Privacy & Security/Search Permissions/Searching Windows

The other one is the Outlook Index which you get in Outlook /Search/Search Tools/Indexing Status

I have found that I have to leave my PC running for at least 5 hours before it goes to sleep, I send the screen to sleep after a few minutes. It seems that the indexing does eventually work but it is quite slow and never is able to cope if your machine goes to sleep soon after you finish using it. I initially left mine running permanently for a couple of days before the items remaining to be indexed dropped to 0. By trial and error I found that leaving the power sleep mode to 5 hours meant that I am usually fully indexed most of the time.

Jo

The article implies that this will impact desktop search. Does this registry change break searching outside of Outlook, like in file explorer, for example?

My OS also upgraded to Windows 11 and the same issue I have faced.

MilindBhagwat's suggestion thro' this link https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-shares-fix-for-broken-outlook-search-in-windows-11/ I have tried and worked for me. Now search option is working in Outlook. Thanks a lot.

Unfortunatelly this is only a workaround. It's fine if your mailbox is small but, if you need to do a fast search over thounsands mails that is not adeguate anymore.

Indexing search in outlook has to works just like before.

The issue, in my cases are coming only after upgrading windows 10 to windows 11 with outlook present and configurated

I am having the exact same issue. Wish I had not finally given in and upgraded to 11. Should have stayed with Windows 10. It has been over a week and nothing has changed. I am still having lots of issues with it.