Outlook search problems

[bill kalbo]

Greg,

I would suggest that you take a step back and refocus on the WHOLE problem. You should look into restructuring your data to search more efficiently rather than to try to force Outlook to do what you want.

Without knowing all the particulars of your situation, I can only guess that one solution would be to export all your old mail to a database and then update it daily or weekly, etc. That will give you a lot more flexibility of how you categorize and structure the searches.

Bill

My company archives old customer support email in a strange way - first
moving today's mail off to a "Today" box, then into an archive for the
current month, then into separate archives for each month historically.
As a result, finding mail a customer sent me in the past week or two
requires searching through three different folders.

In Office 2003, that was easy - you can explicitly tell Outlook which
folders to search, and it will search only those folders.

I can't seem to find that option in 2007 after yesterday's "upgrade". Am
I missing something obvious? I installed the newfangled "Windows search
4.0" that Outlook recommended, but that contributed nothing to solving
this problem and it took up big honkin' chunks of RAM with the background
indexing process. I don't want to search *all* mail folders, just those
three that I choose. How can I do that?

--
Peter B. Steiger
Cheyenne, WY
If you must reply by email, you can reach me by placing zeroes
where you see stars: wypbs.**1 at gmail.com.

On Friday, February 06, 2009 12:13 PM Roady [MVP] wrote:
Use CTRL+SHIFT+F to bring up the Advanced Search Pane

As an alternative you could also create a Search Folder with those 3 folders
to break through folder structure that your company creates and then use
Instant Search instead.

On Sunday, February 08, 2009 9:10 AM Roady [MVP] wrote:
You should be able to select multiple folders by using Advanced Find as long
as these folders reside in the same message store.

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
Coauthor, Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003
http://www.howto-outlook.com/
Outlook FAQ, HowTo, Downloads, Add-Ins and more

http://www.msoutlook.info/
Real World Questions, Real World Answers

On Monday, February 09, 2009 6:14 AM Roady [MVP] wrote:
Could you tell me where all those folders reside?
Is it within your own mailbox, a Public Folder, a pst-file or a server-side
archiving infrastructure?

Could it be that they have changed more than just Outlook on the user side?
Meaning; they also made changes at the server side?
I cannot repro your issue here.

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
Coauthor, Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003
http://www.howto-outlook.com/
Outlook FAQ, HowTo, Downloads, Add-Ins and more

http://www.msoutlook.info/
Real World Questions, Real World Answers