I'm in a bit of a bind - the owner of my company brought to my attention that after i put Outlook 2010 on his computer his searching is incomplete.  He pointed to a major e-mail we get weekly from our Factory that contains information about orders shipped that week.  This e-mail is generated by a simple HTML table that contains rows of order numbers and data about those orders.  I've tested these e-mails on mine and i also have the same issue - searching for order numbers that are contained in these e-mails do not show up in searches.

It seems like it might be the formatting of the e-mail that is the issue.  For example, i can search for an order number and other e-mails come up with that in the subject line or body, but not these e-mails where the order number is in the body, but in a table cell.

jared

• Moved by Jennifer ZhanModerator Monday, October 04, 2010 7:19 AM (From:Office 2010 Setup and Deployment)

Hi Jared,

I tried to re-produce your issue by following steps:

I insert a table in a new message. In this table, I input some order numbers such as 20101005 and the header of email is without any order number. Then I sent this email to myself.

When I type 20101005 in search box or press Ctrl+E, I can find this email without any problems.

So I suggest you rebuild your indexing options to have a try.

• Click the Start button, and then click Control Panel.
• Windows Vista     Click System Maintenance, and then click Indexing Options. In Classic view, double-click Indexing Options.
• Windows XP     Under See Also, click Other Control Panel Options, and then click Indexing Options. In Classic view, double-click Indexing Options.
• Click Advanced.
• Click Rebuild.
• Restart Outlook.

In addition, I use HTML as my message format.

Hope that helps.

Jennifer, i really appreciate you replying to this and giving me suggestions.  It may be strange to reproduct the issue, because i've noticed that when i forward one of the e-mails to someone here it is searchable - in my sent folder as well as the person that gets it.  But, when the e-mail comes from the factory to us not one single person here in the office can search it.

I have tested multiple computers and even did a clean install of Windows 7 / Outlook 2010 on a computer and it couldn't search these e-mails.  So, it isn't a rebulding of the index.

I would be more than willing to have the factory send an e-mail to you so you can test it on your side and see if this is something that you have issues with.  Or, any other suggestions would be wonderful!

jared

Would you be able to help any more Jennifer - i'm excited to have someone from Microsoft on this issue.  I do believe it is a flaw in either windows or WDS.

jared

I am having the same issue on Outlook 2010 under Windows 7 Enterprise Edition (64-bit).  It also seems to be a bug.  I have checked the indexing status on the Exchange 2010 server and all seems to be okay on the server side - this really seems to be a client issue.

My machine is a brand new, 64-bit, Optiplex 980 with i7 processor, 4GB RAM - it's a pretty fast machine.

The "items remaining to be searched" number often goes UP!  It's very frustrating, because I really rely on Outlook search to locate my emails and it's not locating many of the recent emails.  I do have 2 PST folders, some Sharepoint lists, and some internet calendars in Outlook, as well - but the problem doesn't go away if I exclude them from the indexing.

I am working in Cached Exchange mode.

Going to rebuild the search index on my machine per Jennifer's suggestion and see what happens ...

Pam

That sucks you are having issues as well.  Mine isn't quite the same because my index status shows 0 items to be indexed, the e-mails i'm not able to find in a search are about 300 over the last 10 years and certain words in them can be searched - but not others.

I agree that is is frusterating because these e-mails are the most important to be searched of any and all e-mail we get daily!

jared

I am having a similar problem.  Everything is indexed but my search will not return an item if it is in the subject of an e-mail only.  Any ideas what I could do to fix that?  Should I start a new question elsewhere?  Thanks!

honestly, i have tried and tried to find an answer to no avail...i've posted this in as many different forums as i could think of to get an answer because i don't know if it is Windows 7, WDS (windows desktop search), Outlook, SBS 2008, etc. etc. etc -- nobody (and many have given good ideas) has been able to help me with this...

I hope you have better luck and if you figure out what it is please let me know and post it EVERYWHERE...

My issue is a bit different than yours, because it isn't the issue in the subject line - it has to do with the body of the e-mail itself...

jared

You should enable the exchange cached mode on your outlook profile. That setting will fix your issue

I had this issue as well under Win 7 64-bit and Outlook 2010 64-bit and it is being resolved right now - indexing was at a standstill until I unchecked Use Exchange Cached Mode, restarted Outlook, then the problem was gone and I could search everywhere.  I then checked Use Exchange Cached Mode again, restarted Outlook one more time and even though I am getting the same searching message, now the number of items pending are going down and I expect search to once again return meaningful results in an hour or so.

Scott

I have tried checked and unchecked...this is a major bug in the indexing service for windows and i've even sent video of the issue to someone at microsoft and they didn't have an answer for me...

 

jared

Did anyone ever figure out a fix for this issue?  I am running Win 7 x64 with Office 2010 x32 and cannot search for items in tables from html email.  I have a coworker that is running the same version of office, but is running XP x32 and can search these messages. 

 

Another strange thing, I can search for these message just fine in OWA /Office Web app.

• Edited by Securitypimp Thursday, November 10, 2011 7:03 PM

nope - never got a straight fix from anyone...i've tried in various forums, with a microsoft tech support person, etc...you described exactly what issue we are having - windows 7/outlook can't see in html/tables for search but XP can...

if you figure out anything - please let me know!

 

jared

We have the very same problem.

Some of the content of a html table is not searchable. (It seems that there are some html tables that have no such problem, so I guess it depends on the table format somehow.)

I checked and if I forward the mail I can search the content of the table in my sent items, and I tried to compare the html source of the original mail and the forwarded one and they seems very different.

I would really like to see some fix for this.

I think I figured out what the problem is... 

If I have a html table in the mail, something like this:

<table>

<tr><td>06/06/2013</td><td>China</td><td>Hong Kong</td></tr>

</table>

Outlook will index it by stripping the table/tr/td tags, and splitting the string into words: "06", "06", "2013ChinaHong", "Kong"

So in the end you will not be able to find your mail if you search for "China", but you will be able to find it if you search for "2013ChinaHong"

But this does not happen if you create the mail with the table inside outlook, because outlook adds lots and lots of other tags to the table (e.g.: p tags to each cell), and in the end it will be indexed correctly. In my experience it fails only for mails coming from the outside world.

I'm in a bit of a bind - the owner of my company brought to my attention that after i put Outlook 2010 on his computer his searching is incomplete.  He pointed to a major e-mail we get weekly from our Factory that contains information about orders shipped that week.  This e-mail is generated by a simple HTML table that contains rows of order numbers and data about those orders.  I've tested these e-mails on mine and i also have the same issue - searching for order numbers that are contained in these e-mails do not show up in searches.

It seems like it might be the formatting of the e-mail that is the issue.  For example, i can search for an order number and other e-mails come up with that in the subject line or body, but not these e-mails where the order number is in the body, but in a table cell.

jared

It is 2015 and I have the same problem, the content inside html tables are not indexed.