[English]Quick note to people with Windows 11 who use Outlook and are wondering why search doesn't work. It's not you, Microsoft broke Outlook search again and is investigating how that could happen. At least there's confirmation that this is a bug.
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A broken Outlook search has kind of been a running gag for years – here's a tech community post from April 2022 about Windows 10 and Outlook. As of June 8, 2022, Microsoft has published the postOutlook Search might not display recent emails on Windows 11 (via), which addresses a new problem.
Outlook Search broken
The new problem, what Microsoft confirmed, is, that on Windows 11, Outlook (desktop) search does not display recent emails in search results. Microsoft says: Users who try to check Windows indexing options in Control Panel may find that indexing runs slowly or is paused. According to Microsoft, this problem mainly affects users with POP, IMAP and offline Exchange accounts. There, the Outlook search mainly uses the local Windows search service to index emails.
Emails hosted by on Microsoft 365 and connected Exchange accounts use the service search for much of the search areas, which are not affected by this issue. Microsoft is currently working on a fix and will update the status of this article once a release date for the fix is known.
A workaround
Microsoft suggests temporarily disabling Windows Desktop Search (until a fix is available) as a workaround. This will cause Outlook to use the built-in search. Integrated Search displays the following message to indicate that it is not using the Windows Search service:
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Disabling desktop search and forcing Outlook search must be done by modifying the registry. To do this, call the registry editor with administrative permissions and then add the subkey Windows Search in the branch:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows
Add the 32 bit DWORD value PreventIndexingOutlook=1 to this subkey.
After restarting Outlook, mails should be found again in the search. With the value PreventIndexingOutlook=0 the internal search is switched off again.
