Symptoms: In Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2011, you receive a “No Results” message when you try to search for an email message. Additionally, when you search by using the Mac OS native Spotlight Search, your search may not be successful.
Problem Cause: Most likely, your Mac Spotlight index is either disabled for your drive, or the index is corrupted.
Solutions:
Option 1: Spotlight Indexing Not Complete
If you recently created a new Outlook Identity or a new account, or if you recently imported new data such as from a PST or OLM file, Spotlight indexing may not be complete. In this case, Outlook displays a “No Results” message. In this scenario, wait for indexing to finish, and then search again.
Option 2: Special Characters in Identity Name
Make sure that your Identity name has no special characters, such as a front slash (/) character. To view your Identity names in the Microsoft Database Utility, hold down the Option key, and then click the Outlook icon. If the Identity name contains a special character, follow these steps to change the Identity name:
- Open the following Office 2011 Identities folder: Users/<Username>/Documents/Microsoft user data/Office 2011 Identities/
Then, determine whether any Identity contains any special characters.
- Rename the Identity by removing any special characters.
- Open the Microsoft Database Utility. To do this, hold down the Option key, and then click the Outlook icon. Confirm that the Identity name was changed.
- Select the Identity, click the Gear icon, and then click Set as Default.
Option 3: Spotlight Index is Disabled for the Volume
- From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.
- Click Spotlight.
- Click the Privacy tab.
- Any volume in the list will not be indexed
- Remove the volume that contains your Outlook data file if it is in the list
Option 4: Spotlight Index is Corrupt
- Launch Terminal
- Type “sudo mdutil -i off /” and hit enter
- Type “sudo mdutil -E /” and hit enter
- Type “sudo rm -Rf /var/folders/*” and hit enter
- Type “sudo rm -Rf /.Spotlight-V100/*” and hit enter
- Restart your Mac
- Launch Terminal again
- Type “sudo mdutil -a -i on” and hit enter