For years I have fixed search issues by going to Control Panel / Indexing Options and twiddling with the options to rebuild the local index or add locations. The local search is handled by “Windows Desktop Search”. The extra click would then run the search on the entire online mailbox and give you more results. That’s why your first search results used to cover only some of the search results, with the “Click here to view more” message. When your local computer’s copy of Windows runs a search, it consults the cached mail in the. Most people never change it from the default – 1 year of mail is kept offline in a deeply buried.

There’s a slider under File / Info / Account settings / Account settings / Change mailbox. So to reiterate: for my loyal small business audience, this only applies to you if you’re using the desktop version of Outlook 2016 with a business Office 365 mailbox.įor several years, Outlook has been configured by default only to download a portion of your mailbox from the online Office 365 servers. That covers a lot of people now because it includes almost everyone whose Office programs were installed with an Office 365 Home or Business license. Only the latest version of Outlook 2016 can talk to this new search engine. (The same technology is built into Exchange 2016 for companies running onsite mail servers.) Microsoft has introduced new search technology named FAST Search in the giant Exchange servers that run its business Office 365 mail system. The entire mailbox is searched you no longer have to click on the message “Click here to view more on Microsoft Exchange” to get older results. If you’re using the desktop version of Outlook 2016 with a business Office 365 mailbox, then your email searches are faster and more accurate than ever before.īut there is an interesting limit that you’ll wish I hadn’t mentioned because you won’t be able to stop seeing it once I point it out.īy default, searches in Outlook 2016 are now sent to the Office 365 online server instead of being handled by your local copy of Windows. The rest of you can take a day off and rest up for the next article. The changes are almost (but not quite) invisible, so the details are only important if you’re an Outlook power searcher.

Microsoft has changed the way we search for mail in Outlook 2016.

Outlook 2016 indexing shared mailbox