Outlook searches are broken on Windows 11

Dec 6, 2021 15:12 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has recently acknowledged another bug in Windows 11, this time concerning the Outlook searches users perform after installing the new operating system.

More specifically, Microsoft explains that some users who upgrade to Windows 11 would no longer be able to get any results for their Outlook searches due to the search index that’s being deleted during the installation of the OS.

In an advisory published recently, Microsoft also offered a workaround, explaining that users just need to trigger the rebuild of the search index in Outlook.

“After upgrade to Windows 11, Outlook searches return no results. This issue will happen with any account where the emails and other items are stored locally in PST or OST files such as POP and IMAP accounts. For Exchange and Microsoft 365 hosted accounts, this issue will affect offline search for the data in the locally stored OST files. During the Windows upgrade, the search index is deleted and gets rebuilt after the upgrade is completed,” the company explains.

The workaround

Fixing the whole thing is pretty simple, and it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes.

First and foremost, Microsoft says users need to manually rebuild the search index, and to do this, they just have to launch Outlook, select the search box and in the ribbon go to Search Tools > Indexing Status.

“If the indexing is taking too long and you need to urgently search, you can set a registry key that will tell Outlook to use its built-in search using the steps listed in this article under the temporary workaround section: If the indexing is taking too long and you need to urgently search, you can set a registry key that will tell Outlook to use its built-in search using the steps listed in this article under the temporary workaround section: No search results for POP, IMAP, or Exchange accounts,” the company explains.

The bug impacts Outlook for Microsoft 365, Outlook 2019, and Outlook 2016.