No search results for gmail IMAP account in Outlook

Copper Contributor

Greetings,

So in March Outlook stopped indexing my gmail and a search for any mail item would yield no results. I followed all the standard troubleshooting advice. Repair, full reinstall, rebuild the index yadayada. No progress. In the end I found this workaround:

 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/outlook-search-not-showing-recent-emails-after-windows-up...
"You can work around the issue by disabling Windows Desktop Search which will cause Outlook to use its built-in search. The built-in search will display the following to indicate it is not using the Windows Search service:"

Not really ideal and doesn't really solve the issue.

The issue mysteriously went away in April independent of any update. It just come back. When I check indexing status from the search tab it shows all items unindexed and no progress. When I check through file-options-search-indexing options it shows gradual progress but this makes no difference to search functionality. 

Posting here in the hope there's a simple solution, before I finally take the plunge and ditch outlook for good. 

Thanks in advance for any help



OS BUILD 22000.675
Office 365 64bit clean install fully up to date. 

2 Replies
I am having virtually identical issue, and everyone else in my company that uses Outlook is having same issue. We have followed all troubleshooting steps except disabling Windows search by modifying the registry.

Would love some input from Microsoft since Outlook is their product....

@StevenSoule I am also having the same issue since upgrading from office 2016 to 2019.

 

The work around that I managed to stumble upon was to create a new Archive folder and move everything into there from the folder that isn't working properly. I was then able to search as intended using the new folder.

 

Not sure why this worked but if anyone has any ideas I would love to know.