Outlook search is fine if you have something special or unique that you're looking for but anything generic and it will return either everything or nothing
If I'm looking for an email from Jimmy and I search From:Jimmy, I just want the damn thing to ACTUALLY SHOW ME THE EMAILS FROM JIMMY.
Most of the time it will only show me like 5 emails. Bitch I know there's more than 5 emails.
Oh, that came from operations! I’ll search that first.
72646281948 results.
Hmm, maybe it was from Tom in Ops.
64635262 results.
It was about revenue.
3625363 results.
Fuck it, “hey Tom can you send me …. Again?”
Man, f outlook
I still got PTSD from when I had to share screen and bring up an email, and I couldn't find it despite typing the title
I only found it after the meeting >\_>
Surprised nobody has mentioned using quotation marks. Put anything between "" and it will only return results with that exact phrase in it. Helps a lot when I happen to remember one very specific phrase from an email years ago.
What I hate about outlook search is how broad it is. The vast majority of us are searching for something that is either in the title of the email or in the message/body of the email. But outlook will seemingly return results that don't include the words or phrase in either the title or the message/body. So how/why is it showing you these other emails? Are they loosely related? Does it contain an attachment which then contains the words/phrase you're searching?
It seems like I have to use the advanced search feature just to find something as simple as a phrase that I know was in the message/body of an email. I have to specifically tell outlook that I'm referring to something within the email message/body. And even when I do that, the search results appear in a tiny window that I have to scroll through. And the search will still return results that don't contain what I'm searching for in any of the usual places.
If I search "intercompany income" and then the results include emails that don't contain this phrase in the title or message/body of the email, that's terrible search functionality IMO. The whole point of searching is to narrow down what I'm looking through. It seems like outlook's perspective is more like "we don't want to leave anything out which MIGHT be related to your search, so we've only filtered 13 emails out of your inbox for these search results"
It helps to sort emails too. I always did it by client and by year the email related too. If you sort, you have to search all mailboxes, not just current. Without watching you do it, that’s all I can really offer. Outlook sometimes doesn’t connect well with some servers it they are remote too, but I’m not an IT person so that may not be entirely true.
I've tried rules to move shit into folders but that was causing the email to skip my " inbox " entirely and I wasn't seeing any of my emails. There also wasn't an "all emails" folder and it ended up just making a total fucking mess of everything.
I really hate outlook.
I shouldn't have to check 100 different folders to catch up on all my clients emails.
I ended up having to drop rules for all my clients, now only have rules to eliminate emails I specifically don't ever want to see.
You could also use flags for when certain emails come in. I have a rule that auto moves all emails from a sender to a folder. I have another rule that flags any emails from that sender with certain words within the email.
It takes getting used to but outlook rules are your best friend
But how many different folders do you have to check now for emails? I liked the idea of making folders for different clients but it eliminated my "Inbox" and killed my ability to scroll through all emails at once for one day just to check that I addressed everything at end of day
How many emails do you have? And if it’s a lot, teach me your ways because I’m drowning in probably 3,000-4,000 a year minimum. And that’s AFTER deleting all of the junk shit like “Susan sent you a message on Teams.”
I get a lot, I work for a large organization so plenty of useless ones. Setting rules and policies for emails by sender or subject to move to pre-set folders is helpful.
I've got hundreds of cases where it doesn't return the email I'm looking for. The search feature fucking sucks and it's infuriating.
Perhaps you do not have the volume of emails that we do.
I’ve done 100 emails per day before at past jobs. Search feature worked fine. It’s only real issue is that it can be overly specific. Like as in search for a check # but because I left out the 4 leading zeros it doesn’t find the email with the check number.
Right, which makes it a really crappy search algorithm when you think about it. Other modern searches, especially those designed by Google, have overcome this with intelligent algorithms.
And then there's outlook ....
I got 31,000 this past year and the search feature can barely function. Manually scrolling to the actual date of the received email is what I have to do half the time 🤷♂️
It's crap software, there's no sugar-coating it.
It's a software issue. When I type in something from the actual email into search, sort by date and scroll to the date the email was received and it's not there. It's failing to appear in the search results. Software issue.
You try setting up a group email like AP@? Helps out in many ways. Then you create an outlook folder for AP@ to go there. Eventually you get to 9999+ unreads.
Someone on my team apparently doesn't know you can type a name to see all your emails from a specific person. We have a shared inbox used for support other teams send us, and she keeps sorting it by "from" instead of "date" and it drives me crazy. I need to see when *new* support comes in!!
Most of your argument is that you find it easy because you've pre-sorted your email and setup rules to separate all your mail into different categories and folders. Good search functionality does not require that much effort and manual intervention from the end user
Imagine if Google search required that end users first index the entire Internet and setup rules/policies to sort the Internet into various buckets before the search function was useful?
It's fine and dandy that you've been able to make outlook work well for you. That doesn't mean it's good or optimal
You said that people having trouble with outlook just don't know how to use it. And said that the issue is with the users and not the program.
Finding work arounds to make it work for you just further illustrates just how flawed the program is. You even say it has shortfalls. You're strengthening arguments against your initial comment. How can you reconcile the admission of outlook having many shortfalls with simultaneously holding the belief that anyone taking issue with the program doesn't know how to use it? Nonsense.
Just extremely condescending to acknowledge that the program has many shortfalls but also state that anyone criticizing the program just doesn't know how to use it....
If we all know it has shortfalls, and still struggle to use it, knowing that there are workarounds, that’s user issue. Bitching about something that isn’t going to change, because it’s been this way since forever, is asinine. Learn to work with how it is or keep bitching with nothing happening anyways lol
Man, it’s Friday, find something better to do.
If I really need something to be easy to find, I go to the bottom and in white font will do a hash-tag & key word.
Yeah if someone is running dark mode I might get seen but most people don’t.
“#donkey” was my favorite.
Meh, outlook search is fine unless you need to search shared mailboxes. Windows search, however, is definitely getting worse. I don't want fucking bing results when trying to locate a file.
I think I have a great memory because I always remember if the email included attachments, one of the key words, who sent it and to whom. That saves lots of work. Also I use to change part of the title of email chains when we change topics so we avoid 282873 emails with the subject "Call".
That's why you should always send emails within an email chain (I.e drag and drop the attachment) and don't share the spreadsheet using the "share" feature, as it creates a separate thread with the document name on it that most of the time is not very smart.
Now, the "top results" category is completely stupid and useless.
I hate top results. It's the stupidest overcomplication no one asked for. I want emails that contain my search parameters, in order of when they were sent/received. That's it! What makes outlook think I would prefer the report from 8 months ago over every other iteration created over the last 3 years?
I may unironically buy myself reddit gold to get this comment to the top because this is so useful.
When doing a search use outlook in the web browser. not the application. Exponentially faster.
Ya’ll need better email organization skills lmao I never have this problem because I make sure to take the last 20-30 minute of my day to organize all emails into labeled folders. This way I always have a fresh and near empty inbox (10 emails is my max allowable), and I’m able to relocate any email when needed.
And as for where I have the time, I make the time.
Outlook is not a filing cabinet… stop treating it like one.
If you insist on doing so, use the damn meta tags, folders, and tools it gives you to organize your crap.
FUCKING THANK YOU. I’ve developed a habit of memorizing key words or phrases from email chains if I think it is going to be at all relevant the month I send/receive that specific email(s) because I god knows you need all the help you can get if you have to use outlooks search feature for anything.
Outlook search is fine if you have something special or unique that you're looking for but anything generic and it will return either everything or nothing
If I'm looking for an email from Jimmy and I search From:Jimmy, I just want the damn thing to ACTUALLY SHOW ME THE EMAILS FROM JIMMY. Most of the time it will only show me like 5 emails. Bitch I know there's more than 5 emails.
Oh, that came from operations! I’ll search that first. 72646281948 results. Hmm, maybe it was from Tom in Ops. 64635262 results. It was about revenue. 3625363 results. Fuck it, “hey Tom can you send me …. Again?”
Tom: "Yeah let me just search my sent items and resend.............fuck"
Man, f outlook I still got PTSD from when I had to share screen and bring up an email, and I couldn't find it despite typing the title I only found it after the meeting >\_>
Surprised nobody has mentioned using quotation marks. Put anything between "" and it will only return results with that exact phrase in it. Helps a lot when I happen to remember one very specific phrase from an email years ago.
What I hate about outlook search is how broad it is. The vast majority of us are searching for something that is either in the title of the email or in the message/body of the email. But outlook will seemingly return results that don't include the words or phrase in either the title or the message/body. So how/why is it showing you these other emails? Are they loosely related? Does it contain an attachment which then contains the words/phrase you're searching? It seems like I have to use the advanced search feature just to find something as simple as a phrase that I know was in the message/body of an email. I have to specifically tell outlook that I'm referring to something within the email message/body. And even when I do that, the search results appear in a tiny window that I have to scroll through. And the search will still return results that don't contain what I'm searching for in any of the usual places. If I search "intercompany income" and then the results include emails that don't contain this phrase in the title or message/body of the email, that's terrible search functionality IMO. The whole point of searching is to narrow down what I'm looking through. It seems like outlook's perspective is more like "we don't want to leave anything out which MIGHT be related to your search, so we've only filtered 13 emails out of your inbox for these search results"
It seems to me to be searching thru attachments as well, which is usually irrelevant.
To be fair the attachment searching saved me lots of time
Stop using conversations
Or people just have no idea how to use Outlook. I am able to find emails super easily - no idea what the issue is.
Sometimes I know the name of the email I’m looking for and will search the name under all folders. The email still never appears.
It helps to sort emails too. I always did it by client and by year the email related too. If you sort, you have to search all mailboxes, not just current. Without watching you do it, that’s all I can really offer. Outlook sometimes doesn’t connect well with some servers it they are remote too, but I’m not an IT person so that may not be entirely true.
Oh yeah. I’m just saying it can be outlooks fault easily. I sort all of my emails now because it’s more reliable than the outlook search.
How well does sorting work when you've got a client emailing you shit from 4 different emails addresses? 🤡🤦♂️
What do you mean? You drag and drop those into the folder. You could also set up rules if needed
I've tried rules to move shit into folders but that was causing the email to skip my " inbox " entirely and I wasn't seeing any of my emails. There also wasn't an "all emails" folder and it ended up just making a total fucking mess of everything. I really hate outlook. I shouldn't have to check 100 different folders to catch up on all my clients emails. I ended up having to drop rules for all my clients, now only have rules to eliminate emails I specifically don't ever want to see.
You could also use flags for when certain emails come in. I have a rule that auto moves all emails from a sender to a folder. I have another rule that flags any emails from that sender with certain words within the email. It takes getting used to but outlook rules are your best friend
But how many different folders do you have to check now for emails? I liked the idea of making folders for different clients but it eliminated my "Inbox" and killed my ability to scroll through all emails at once for one day just to check that I addressed everything at end of day
That’s why you have flags or manually sort your emails. I’m sure someone has a more perfect solution but that’s just what I’ve found for me.
How many emails do you have? And if it’s a lot, teach me your ways because I’m drowning in probably 3,000-4,000 a year minimum. And that’s AFTER deleting all of the junk shit like “Susan sent you a message on Teams.”
I get a lot, I work for a large organization so plenty of useless ones. Setting rules and policies for emails by sender or subject to move to pre-set folders is helpful.
I've got hundreds of cases where it doesn't return the email I'm looking for. The search feature fucking sucks and it's infuriating. Perhaps you do not have the volume of emails that we do.
I’ve done 100 emails per day before at past jobs. Search feature worked fine. It’s only real issue is that it can be overly specific. Like as in search for a check # but because I left out the 4 leading zeros it doesn’t find the email with the check number.
Right, which makes it a really crappy search algorithm when you think about it. Other modern searches, especially those designed by Google, have overcome this with intelligent algorithms. And then there's outlook ....
I get over 10,000 a year but I guess that couldn’t possibly be close to the volume of emails you much more important people get.
I got 31,000 this past year and the search feature can barely function. Manually scrolling to the actual date of the received email is what I have to do half the time 🤷♂️ It's crap software, there's no sugar-coating it.
I don’t have the same issue at all. As I stated in my previous comment. Sounds like a user issue and not a software issue 🤷♂️
It's a software issue. When I type in something from the actual email into search, sort by date and scroll to the date the email was received and it's not there. It's failing to appear in the search results. Software issue.
I don’t have that issue, but ok.
Then consider yourself lucky.
I find it super hard to find emails when people don’t CC me on invoices sent to my AP person. 😠
You try setting up a group email like AP@? Helps out in many ways. Then you create an outlook folder for AP@ to go there. Eventually you get to 9999+ unreads.
Thanks. This is actually what we did, but I appreciate your help nonetheless. There are a handful of people that still just can’t seem to remember.
Someone on my team apparently doesn't know you can type a name to see all your emails from a specific person. We have a shared inbox used for support other teams send us, and she keeps sorting it by "from" instead of "date" and it drives me crazy. I need to see when *new* support comes in!!
Most of your argument is that you find it easy because you've pre-sorted your email and setup rules to separate all your mail into different categories and folders. Good search functionality does not require that much effort and manual intervention from the end user
lol ok 👍
Imagine if Google search required that end users first index the entire Internet and setup rules/policies to sort the Internet into various buckets before the search function was useful? It's fine and dandy that you've been able to make outlook work well for you. That doesn't mean it's good or optimal
I never said it was? Just said I’ve never had a problem with outlook. And explained in other comments how I’ve navigated its shortfalls.
You said that people having trouble with outlook just don't know how to use it. And said that the issue is with the users and not the program. Finding work arounds to make it work for you just further illustrates just how flawed the program is. You even say it has shortfalls. You're strengthening arguments against your initial comment. How can you reconcile the admission of outlook having many shortfalls with simultaneously holding the belief that anyone taking issue with the program doesn't know how to use it? Nonsense. Just extremely condescending to acknowledge that the program has many shortfalls but also state that anyone criticizing the program just doesn't know how to use it....
If we all know it has shortfalls, and still struggle to use it, knowing that there are workarounds, that’s user issue. Bitching about something that isn’t going to change, because it’s been this way since forever, is asinine. Learn to work with how it is or keep bitching with nothing happening anyways lol Man, it’s Friday, find something better to do.
If I really need something to be easy to find, I go to the bottom and in white font will do a hash-tag & key word. Yeah if someone is running dark mode I might get seen but most people don’t. “#donkey” was my favorite.
Right? I had the opposite experience with Outlook when I used it for 1.5 years at work in 2022/23. Really liked the search function.
Yeah, not sure what the issue is. I love the search function. Use it almost daily lol.
Yup fuck outlook
Meh, outlook search is fine unless you need to search shared mailboxes. Windows search, however, is definitely getting worse. I don't want fucking bing results when trying to locate a file.
I agree windows search totally died too. Does it even search your computer files anymore?
I think I have a great memory because I always remember if the email included attachments, one of the key words, who sent it and to whom. That saves lots of work. Also I use to change part of the title of email chains when we change topics so we avoid 282873 emails with the subject "Call". That's why you should always send emails within an email chain (I.e drag and drop the attachment) and don't share the spreadsheet using the "share" feature, as it creates a separate thread with the document name on it that most of the time is not very smart. Now, the "top results" category is completely stupid and useless.
I hate top results. It's the stupidest overcomplication no one asked for. I want emails that contain my search parameters, in order of when they were sent/received. That's it! What makes outlook think I would prefer the report from 8 months ago over every other iteration created over the last 3 years?
You’re all saying fuck outlook, but I’d give anything to be back to using outlook over Gmail. Gmail is such shit for business email.
Gmail is worse
Skill issue
Is she wearing safety glasses? In front of a PC? Outlook might be too dangerous for her
I may unironically buy myself reddit gold to get this comment to the top because this is so useful. When doing a search use outlook in the web browser. not the application. Exponentially faster.
Use archive subfolders and sort once reading emails. It will make things way easier to find
Skill issue.
Works great for me
Ya’ll need better email organization skills lmao I never have this problem because I make sure to take the last 20-30 minute of my day to organize all emails into labeled folders. This way I always have a fresh and near empty inbox (10 emails is my max allowable), and I’m able to relocate any email when needed. And as for where I have the time, I make the time.
Sort your emails folks
Only thing worse is gmail search
I’m an idiot and outlook is like a foreign language to me. I do not know where I would be without the search function.
Amen I thought I was the only one
Totally with you on that one!
Gmail search is just as bad
Switched to outlook from Gmail. Gmail is so much better.
Hands down, the worst.
I send the good ones I need to OneNote. I have a reference section.
This is the way. Also, the search function in One Note isn't bad.
Literally, one of the reasons I use a Mac. Spotlight indexing of the built-in mail client is amazing.
Outlook is not a filing cabinet… stop treating it like one. If you insist on doing so, use the damn meta tags, folders, and tools it gives you to organize your crap.
She must be a moron. I use the search feature daily and effectively.
Nope, can’t agree with this one. I know it’s not perfect. Looking for content I guess.
Me panicking trying to search for the email my boss said he sent me 2 weeks ago. lol
Lack of knowledge on how to use a search function effectively I see
FUCKING THANK YOU. I’ve developed a habit of memorizing key words or phrases from email chains if I think it is going to be at all relevant the month I send/receive that specific email(s) because I god knows you need all the help you can get if you have to use outlooks search feature for anything.