Outlook Search may be good at finding things – but not so good at telling you WHERE it found them

Figure 1.
Once you have found it, it is then easy to double-click on the message in the list of results. It will open as you would expect and you may be relieved to have retrieved it. If it was mis-filed, it’s only natural to want to move it from its current folder into the correct one. And here’s where the fun begins…. how on earth do you find out where it’s currently filed? The natural thing to do is to right-click somewhere, to get a “Properties” option, but there isn’t a context menu or option for this. This strikes me as a peculiar omission – especially in a program that’s been around as long as Outlook has. Never mind, though, we can find the answer by coming at it from a different angle.

Figure 2.
If you know exactly where that folder is (and if the name is unique within your email structure), then that’s it. You can navigate to that folder in the normal way and drag-and-drop the message into the folder you expected it to be in before you had to search for it.

Figure 3.
So, to find out exactly which “Orders” sub-folder it is in, we have to be a little devious:
- Open the message in its own window (eg by double-clicking on it in a list of search results)
- Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl Shift f to open “Advanced Find”
- Click on Browse (see figure 3) and you will see the current folder (ie where the message currently resides) within the hierarchy of your email folders

Figure 4.