Outlook Search may be good at finding things – but it’s not so good at telling you WHERE it found them
Simple search in Outlook
To begin with, a bit of clarification about “Outlook”
This article is about the version of Outlook that is part of Microsoft 365 (or Microsoft Office, as it used to be called). In other words, it is the traditional, full-blown, version of Outlook.
It is not about “New Outlook” (a free email program that is part of Windows). It is not about “Outlook.com” (Microsoft’s webmail) and it is not about the Outlook “apps” found on mobile phones.
Back to Outlook Search
If you have a lot of email folders in your Outlook and can’t find something that you are sure is there, then using the Outlook Search function with the scope set to either Current Mailbox (to search all folders for the currently selected email address) or All Mailboxes (to search all folders of all email addresses) will probably find it – see Figure 1.
But which folder holds the new-found message?
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. If it was just in the wrong folder, you may want to move 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 for this. Never mind, we can find the answer by coming at it from a different angle.
Finding the folder that holds the message
The quickest place to start is by clicking “Alt Enter” either when looking at the email in a list of search results, or when looking at the content of the email itself. In either case, this will open a window of properties for the current item. Look next to “Location” in Figure 2 to see which folder holds the email.
We are making progress, but it doesn’t give any indication as to where that folder sits in the hierarchy of your email folders.
If you know exactly where that folder is (and assuming that the name is unique within your email structure), then that’s it. You can navigate to that folder in the normal way. Then just drag-and-drop the message into the folder where it belongs.
You may have many folders with the same name
But suppose, for instance, that you have folders for each of several products and each of those has a sub-folder called “Marketing”. The “Alt Enter” method ” doesn’t really help very much in telling you where that folder is located.
And now for the cunning plan
So, to find out exactly which “Marketing” 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
You can now see exactly which folder includes the message, and can navigate to that folder in the usual way (See Figure 4).
Then just move the message to the correct folder.
(In my example in Figure 4 I don’t have my “Marketing” folder inside a “Products” folder, but I hope you get the idea).
Post icon (featured image) designed by David Leonard with Microsoft Designer
Screen grabs from Microsoft desktop Outlook (aka classic Outlook) – or whatever they are calling it this week to distinguish it from Outlook.com and New Outlook.
