Windows updates have a bad habit of spoil some things while correcting others. In this case the problem affected the search within Outlook for users of Windows 10 and Windows 11. This may seem like an irrelevant problem but no, a lot of people use email search in the face of a flood of them.
How to fix the problem in Outlook search
Now Microsoft has reported that this issue is also affecting Windows users who installed last month’s cumulative update, KB5008212. It is possible that recent emails are not showing up in search results after installing this patch. The company is still investigating the problem, but has offered a solution in the meantime.
If you want to avoid the problem entirely, you can tell Outlook that you want to use Outlook internal search instead of the Windows Search Index by editing the registry. We leave you the tutorial of MSPU next:
- In Windows, we right-click Start and select Run. In the Open box: we write regedit and we click OK. This will open the Registry Editor.
- We look for this subkey in the registry and click on it:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE NSOFTWARE NPolicies NMicrosoft NWindows - We click on Edit> New> Key, and name the new key Windows Search.
- We select the new Windows Search key.
- We click on Edit> New> DWORD Value.
- We write PreventIndexingOutlook as the name of the DWORD and press Enter.
- We right-click on PreventIndexingOutlook and then select Modify.
- In the Value data box, we type 1 to enable the registry entry, and then we click OK.
- We exit Registry Editor and restart Outlook.
We hope we have helped you with this problem, if you have experienced it. If you have any problem, leave us a comment and we will try to help you solve it. In the meantime, we hope that Windows updates will have fewer and fewer bugs associated with it.