Search not working on Outlook 16.79 on Mac Sonoma

If you have a hunt around you'll see this is one of many faults with the very, very buggy New Outlook that have never been addressed (large font issues, flaky importation of data etc). The only real solution is to revert to legacy. My wife and I both keep an old Mac with the legacy Outlook on it and use that if we need to search.

If you have managed to import data - it'**** and miss - you may find the missing mail by going to the folder it's in, but the New Outlook seems unable to do a search of all your emails. You get random hits if you are lucky. Rebuilding the index doesn't help.

New Outlook is definitely VERY, VERY buggy.

Thank you VERY much - this solved the problem. In passing the problem didnt exist in NEW OUTLOOK, but that also managed to not pick up a large number of my emails on my computer. They have appeared again once I switch back to LEGACY. This is incredibly frustrating and unprofessional by MS.

I am on Mac Sonoma V14.3.1 and Outlook for Mac 16.3.3 and there is no such thing as a "Preferences" menu nor a "Search" menu. Under Settings there is no way to re-index the Search. Can you please review this and provide instructions that align with the actual OS and app version? My Outlook search window in my Inbox cannot find ANY emails from people who I regularly receive messages from and it is very frustrating, to the point where I am considering dumping Outlook. Thanks for your help!

Hi, David

Good day!

Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community. We are happy to assist you.

According to your description, I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble with the search function in Outlook for Mac. Here are a few troubleshooting steps you can try:

1. Check for updates: Make sure that you have the latest version of Outlook for Mac installed. To do this, open Outlook and go to Help > Check for Updates.
2. Rebuild the search index: Sometimes the search index can become corrupted, which can cause issues with search. To rebuild the search index, go to Outlook > Preferences > Search > Indexing > Rebuild.
3. Check your search settings: Make sure that your search settings are configured correctly. Go to Outlook > Preferences > Search and make sure that the correct folders are selected for search.

In addition, please give it a shot by creating a new profile and see if it can make any differences - Manage profiles or identities in Outlook for Mac - Microsoft Support.

Note: Please be kindly to backup your important data in case of losing it.

Thanks for your attempts and looking forward to your new updates.

Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.

Sincerely,

Alex | Microsoft Community Moderator.

THANK YOU P Kaufman! I got a new Mac and used Migration Assistant to move everything off an old Mac. Outlook started up normally and seemed to work fine, except for Search not working (as everyone in this chain is experiencing). If you have a new Mac situation like mine, this worked great (note it does take some time to rebuild Spotlight but I started seeing search results about 30 minutes later):

HERE IS WHAT WORKED:

I went to SYSTEM SETTINGS/Siri and Spotlight/Spotlight Privacy (way down at the bottom), There I chose to exclude "Macintosh HD" (my internal SSD) and restarted the computer. I then removed "Macintosh HD" from the exclusion list and again restarted the computer. It's all good now.

I don't see preferences... i just have settings... and it doesn't show search...