Indexing problems Outlook - Windows 11

Thanks for submitting a ticket @JoBo. The team did ask some users to try the “DisablebackOff” reg key to see if it was performance related. I recall one user said it helped right away but the next day the problem returned. If you set the key please report any feedback through the ticket, otherwise probably safe to remove the key while the team investigates further.

The next important data point we need to get for the Search Team to look further is an IDNA trace. This is a pretty involved process that will likely need a support engineer to help walk through the steps. If you or anyone else on the thread has an In App ticket and can spare time to get the trace please let the team know in the ticket.

Hi - yes am already on that and got an interesting reply from them with a suggestion to ‘try to edit a registry value “DisablebackOff” then close Reg edit and restart Outlook.

@John Graetz,

If you have Office Subscription, please open an In App ticket via Help, Contact Support until logs are uploaded and you see a ticket is created. Sometimes people don't get through to ticket creation why I mention that. The In App Team has gotten a few tickets in the last week with search indexing appearing not to complete. The team will be investigating this issue so any extra data we get from tickets helps to better isolate the issue.

Whether you can open a ticket can you share the Windows version. In the Windows Start, Search type in System Information and open that app. On the System Summary what is listed for OS Version? Most of the tickets so far are 10.0.22000.

Thank you Brian for your very interesting experience. I will have a look at doing that, but I have just come across something else very intriguing.

My Outlook caters for 10 active email addresses. When the last indexing completed some weeks ago, there were more than 300,000 items involved.

Today, as mentioned earlier, I had a number of tries at rebuilding, but each appeared to stall after only a handful of reported items being involved. The last attempt started approximately 10 - 11 hours ago. So far, the rebuild indicates that only 20 items have purportedly been indexed during this period. But that turns out to be total rubbish. Far more has happened than this. I did a search on a very active name in emails. That search brought up a very large number of results, dating from 10/6/2022 to 24/1/2011. There are probably some hundreds of results here. Furthermore, these results came from a range of email addresses - at least three.

Just what is happening during this rebuild, could be just doing what it is supposed to do. Whilst on the surface it seems that very little is happening, e.g. only 20 items are supposed to have been indexed in the past 11 hours, that number does not relate to what is really happening. What this leads me to now is that I must not kill my current rebuild and re-start it, in the hope that things will change, but rather, that I should let it keep going and see where that leads to. The only thing that I cannot yet perceive is how I can determine if the rebuild has been completed, unless it tells me that when say 200 supposed items have been indexed. I have no idea as to what this "magic" number might be, but it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

At the moment, I cannot fathom out what the 20 supposed items indexed, could be. One theory is that it could possibly relate to the number of items from my Live.com (a Microsoft related account) that have so far been indexed from that account - it does seem to be possible! This is not a very active account. To add further credence to this theory, I just had a look at the search mentioned in my third paragraph, where the first reported date was 10/6/22 on the name selected. In looking at my Live account, that turns out to be the first occurrence of that name within Live. I just did another search on "HP" which appears as the most recent name in my "Live" account and it came up in my search - very, very, interesting. And to add to that, this particular email arrived in my Live account inbox more than four hours after my latest rebuild commenced.

Whilst all of this is tending to point out that the rebuild is working, it is not possible to tell yet whether or not new items will continue to be indexed once that has completed, which is what the whole problem has been all along.

Hi John

I experienced the same issue starting several days ago and tried all the methods found in the forum except clean install windows 11. none of them worked, the indexed number stopped at 200 the most. I have over 400,000 from outlook. Last night, I did a restore point with oldest date allowed which was 06/15/22. After the retore was completed, the indexing was back to work. This morning, the index was completed. Windows recent update probably messed up the indexing. You probably can try point restore to remove the recent windows update to see if it works for you.