Search misses words that are in Outlook email

[gahoman]

When I search for an emails in Outlook containing certain word, an email
containing that word does not come up. If I search under other words in the
email, the email does come up. Other emails containing the word do come up.
When I search for the word in the general Vista search box (Windows Key +
F), the email does not come up either.

This problem has gone on for several days. So it's not that Vista has not
had time to fully index the email. Also, I've had this problem occasionally
before. It's quite frustrating to not be able to find an item that you know
you have. Thanks.

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

I would view the email in notepad. I suspect some escape character or mime
encoding is changing the text to something you are not searching for.

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[gahoman]

I am the author of the question. Thanks, Mark, for explaining why this may
happen. Is their anyway around this problem? If I'm looking for one email
out of a 1,000, I can't very well paste all my emails into Notepad or better
Word.

I did paste the problem email into Notepad, and did the Find command.
Notepad wasn't able to find the problem word either. However, when I pasted
the email into Word, the Find command worked fine: it located the problem
word.

Perhaps this is just a shortcoming in the Vista indexing system, and there
is no workable solution.

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Well, bug<>feature. If an adobe document were used as a mail format, much
like word formatting, the search would fail also. The search expects the
mail filetype to be either text or HTML. You could try saving all the mail
as those instead, to make them searchable. Of course, that would lose all
that fancy formatting of Word docs.

--
Please use the Communities guidelines when posting.
http://www.microsoft.com/wn3/locales/help/help_en-us.htm
Use the "Ratings" feature. It helps the new users.
Mark L. Ferguson MS-MVP
https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Mark.Ferguson

 

[Ringmaster]

I am the author of the question. Thanks, Mark, for explaining why this may
happen. Is their anyway around this problem? If I'm looking for one email
out of a 1,000, I can't very well paste all my emails into Notepad or better
Word.

I did paste the problem email into Notepad, and did the Find command.
Notepad wasn't able to find the problem word either. However, when I pasted
the email into Word, the Find command worked fine: it located the problem
word.

Perhaps this is just a shortcoming in the Vista indexing system, and there
is no workable solution.

One solution for email would be to use a better news reader email
client. Agent, which I've used for years supports advanced global
searching of received/sent emails easily finding any text in all
folders or some specific folder used to sort your email.

In brief, assuming you know what you're looking for is in a email
message, you would simply open Agent, set it to look for a word or
expression then wait while a list is built. I just tested it looking
at 3409 email messages it found 645 instances of a word I know appears
in many in under 20 seconds building a clickable list of each email
that contained the word.

One problem with Vista's search abilities is it makes one of two
fundamental errors either looking in too many places, like including
system files and folders you would never store your data in or it
doesn't look in enough places unless you take the time to set up
advanced search to teach it some smarts. Again, as it almost always
is, poor design, clumsy controls and lax implementation are the
hallmarks of Microsoft software.