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Paul Barnes's avatar
Paul Barnes
Copper Contributor
Apr 06, 2017

Search in outlook using office 365

I have noticed in the past couple of months that the quality of search within Outlook has gone downhill on my shared mailbox.  I used tyo be able to search for a recipient and it would return both mail from them and also mail i had sent to them, however now it does not return any mail from a recipient only mail i have sent out which is not good.  I have tried allsorts from suggestions on the web around rebuilding indexes, turning it off to only select from a mailbox even uninstalling and re-installing still no good.  One thing i have found is that if i do a search on my mobile device through the OWA app on an android device it returns exactly what i am looking for.  Any help would be gratefully received. 

  • Brent Ellis's avatar
    Brent Ellis
    Silver Contributor
    I can echo these same frustrations, there isnt really a specific explanation, and we have tried to optimize with some of the things in that link before.

    In some cases, we have users begging to go back to version 2013 of Office because of search alone.
  • Searching in shared mailbox(es) depends on how the mailbox is added in Outlook (additional account vs additional mailbox) and whether the content is locally cached (with the "cache slider" also playing a role). Details are here:

     

    https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/outlooking/2014/04/28/understanding-search-scopes-in-microsoft-outlook/

     

    Are you sure you are getting the sent items results from the shared mailbox, or is it your own? Do you happen to have the "keep a copy of sent messages for shared mailbox" option enabled?

    • Paul Barnes's avatar
      Paul Barnes
      Copper Contributor
      Hi Vasil

      This article refers to Outlook 2010,2013 but no mention of Office 365 is this still relevant?
      • VasilMichev's avatar
        VasilMichev
        MVP

        It still applies to newer versions of Outlook. But yes, as Brent mentioned above we now have to take into consideration the server-side search too, which I also have some gripes with...

    • Daniel Kharman's avatar
      Daniel Kharman
      Brass Contributor

      To Vasil's point, be aware the cache slider only works on the primary Exchange account and not additional mailboxes in all versions of Outlook except 2016.

       

      Also, whilst adding a shared mailbox as an additional Exchange account will allow you to control caching via the shared mailboxes own slider, you'll will likely have to roll back when your users tell you they want to receive notifications for their own mailboxes and not the shared mailboxes!

       

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