Forum Discussion
Outlook Search not showing Recent Emails (December-2021)
Gabe_Bratton as you can read in the posts this solution is not working for everybody. There must be more than one issue with Outlook search. I just rolled out 35 upgrades to Office 2021 LTSC, with a mix of Exchange-connected, IMAP, and POP3 clients. The users who are having issues with search are all on Exchange accounts (but not all of the Exchange users have the problem.) I have tried disabling Windows search in Outlook via the published registry setting, to no effect. I have also tried the DisableServerAssistedSearch registry key, updating to 21H2, creating a new profile, etc. The only two solutions that have worked are to disable cached mode and to select "All Outlook Items" in the search drop-down rather than "Current Mailbox." Also of note, these users typically will have a few recent results in their search but nothing older than a week or two, which is the opposite of the situation described in the articles. So again, I think there are multiple issues which is causing some confusion. . .
MicrosoftThe only Outlook search issues I currently know about are those discussed in this thread. Since your users are using Exchange accounts, I would try the following:
Set this Regkey to 0:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search]
"PreventIndexingOutlook"=dword:00000000
Set this Regkey to 1:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\Outlook\Search]
"DisableServerAssistedSearch"=dword:00000001
With this configuration Outlook should only do WDS search. Make sure Cached Mode is enabled and Sync Slider (Mail to keep offline) is set to how much email you need to index, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/troubleshoot/data-files/fewer-emails-in-shared-mailboxes-or-public-folders.
If you search with this configuration and do not find expected results, then I would expect you are seeing one of these issues:
1. Search Indexing has not completed which you can use the steps in this article to check, https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/outlook-search-does-not-return-results-after-upgrade-to-windows-11-cc54dfee-ee78-4123-a9af-7986748052ef.
2. Indexing is completed but you are not seeing expected search results which is the main issue of this thread, https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/outlook-search-not-showing-recent-emails-after-windows-update-kb5008212-cc5345cf-8007-403a-bb23-f3818653c2df.
I quickly tested the PreventIndexingOutlook with Exchange accounts and it still appeared to me Outlook was using MAPI or server search. I would only use this key for POP/IMAP or Exchange if completely offline and no connection to the server.
- Well thanks for the reply! I have spent over two weeks (so far) being passed around Microsoft support (accessed via our distributor Ingram Micro) through a succession of the wrong teams, missed Teams appointments, lack or response etc, waiting for help with this and a server certificate issue. However, if you re-read my post you will see that I already tried the two registry settings you suggest here with no luck. Also I think two weeks has been plenty of time for indexing to finish. As for the other two links, the first just references this same solution (also this did not happen relative to KB5008212, it follows upgrading from Office 2007) and the other is for Windows 11, which is not part of our mix yet. Similarly, you advised me to ensure that Cached mode is enabled when I stated that disabling this was one of the only successful workarounds I have found. But thanks.
Actually though, can you clarify - you said the first setting PreventIndexingOutlook should be set to 0 in order to force Outlook to use its own search, that is the opposite of what we are being told in the articles you linked. Of course, it was also the default setting when the problem arose, so why are you saying to explicitly go back to this state?