Outlook MAC search not working on Monterey

Lucy,

Thanks for your response. This information is super helpful. By checking Activity Monitor it told me that I'm not re-indexing anything. I tried your pixie dust of restarting System Prefs before deleting the Outlook Profile folder, but no luck. Out of curiosity, when you dragged and dropped the Outlook Profile folder into Spotlight/Privacy, did it disappear from the Outlook folder where it was originally located? Mine doesn't, it just seems to copy the folder into the Privacy box. Can't for the life of me tell what I'm missing!

Thanks so much.

Hi Jankowsky,

I let it work overnight (I've got 20 years of messages), so not sure how long it actually was. I tested it in the morning and all was back to normal. Although I didn't recheck the below areas to see it was still going.

Here's how I could tell that it was indexing... I clicked the Spotlight Search icon (top right corner) and typed in random text. I saw the 'Indexing...' process bar running as the below example.

There's also another way to check if Indexing is working... Open Activity Monitor (Utilities Folder). Look at the '% CPU' column (it should be in descending order), to the left of it there should be a 'Process Name' called 'mdworker' (metadata server worker) taking up a relatively high percentage of CPU. It'll go up and down percentage wise.

*Some pixie dust I used to ensure the plus/minus to Privacy worked... after I added the Main Folder to Privacy, I closed the System Preferences then reopened it to delete it. =)

I hope this helps.

Lucy - How did you know when the computer was done re-indexing? I've tried the same process, but still don't have search ability, however, I don't know how long it takes to complete the re-indexing. How did you know when it was done?

Thanks.

I'm so glad this worked for you. I've been able to search in old outlook (I used to be an entourage girl too!). I also have years and years of files from my business and if I couldn't search them I'd be lost. I don't know why they have to make things so complicated. I appreciate your posting this for the next time!

Good to hear Jane. I've got a ton of messages going back year (I was an Entourage girl before this), and flagging/searching is crucial! So last night I got this from Contact Support under Help in Outlook and It solved my issue: Phew!

• Choose Apple menu, then System Preferences, and then Spotlight.
• Select the Privacy tab.
• In Finder:
  1. On the Go menu, select Go to Folder...
  2. Copy and paste the following location into the "Go to the folder:" dialog box and select Go:

~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/

• Drag the "Main Profile" folder to the Privacy tab. Once added, remove the folder, and Spotlight will re-index the folder.
• It did take some time to re-index (I did it overnight)

Take Care