Fixing Instant Search
I’m using Outlook 2007. Instant Search doesn’t display any results at all, only displays results before a certain date or always shows that there are items left to index. I let it index overnight but nothing has changed. How can I get it to completely index my messages?
First let us check if the pst-file has been marked to be indexed. To do this go to Tools-> Options-> Search Options… In the Indexing section you can select which data file to index.
If it has been marked but Outlook doesn’t display the correct results, this usually means there is some corruption going on in your pst-file. In order to fix these you should scan your pst-file for errors with scanpst.exe (you can find this in the same folder as outlook.exe or use OutlookTools (free!) to locate it for you).
Once repaired, open Outlook and leave it idle for some time. To see if everything has been indexed now see Tools-> Instant Search-> Indexing Status. When you have a big pst-file this could take some time but if the number of items left to index doesn’t change after leaving your computer idle for over 30 minutes something is wrong still.
Go back to the Search Options and deselect the data file that is giving you issues. Close Outlook and wait for about 5 minutes and also verify in Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) that on the Processes tab the outlook.exe process actually quits. You might get a lot of disk activity; this is the Search Indexer removing the indexed items from the Index.
After this open Outlook again and go back to the Search Option and select the pst-file we just deselected. Leave the computer idle again and see if it will eventually reach the status of “0 items remaining.”
If it doesn’t, it might be that the Index itself has been damaged. In order to reset this, go to Control Panel-> Indexing Options-> Advanced-> button Rebuild
This will rebuild the entire Index from scratch and depending on the amount of documents to be indexed, this could take quite long and degrade your system’s performance while the Indexer is still busy. I would recommend to have it rebuild itself overnight.
If it stilld doesn’t work press the Restore Defaults button that you can find under the Rebuild button. The difference with Rebuild is that, aside from resetting all customized indexing settings like indexing location and file type selections, it will recreate the actual Index files as well.
Related Categories; Configuring, Errors, Mail Organizing, Mail Reading
