I've had this problem for months: Outlook is unable to search recent items in the inbox.
I was running Outlook 2010 Beta. I've just moved to the Trial version, hoping to solve the issue. I have tons of PST files but one central one I'm mainly concerned with. As of now it seems none of it is indexing.
I've been through all the sites and made all the changes; rebuilt the index, changed the name of the PST files, run scanpst, stopped and started the search services, made sure the Windows features under programs and features has the indexing option checked, etc…
Status now says 'zero items left to index', and 150,000 have been indexed. I think I have a lot more files than that, and also nothing is showing up on any search. I'm not sure what else to do?
Side question. I'm going to be moving out of Outlook. However I have 10Gigs+ of PST files over the years. I want to merge them and make them search-able in the easiest way possible. Any idea on how to do that? Could I even move over to Thunderbird right now and be able to index and search my PST files?
Also, Google Desktop won't index Outlook 2010 email either…
Best Answer
Run Outlook 2010 with the "/safe:3" option, e.g.
This obviates the problem. So far, everything that I need to do works with this so I have made it my default. Maybe one day Microsoft will figure out they have a problem and provide a fix.