Make Office Better
Find specific emails quickly
Outlook has a great feature called Search Folders that can save you time if you often need to hunt down specific emails. You may want to find emails from certain contacts, those that contain certain keywords, or only emails with attachments – or perhaps ones that meet all these criteria. We’ll show you how to create folders that only contain those emails that meet the criteria you set.
Click the Folder tab, then New Search Folder at the top left. In the window that opens, you’ll see several search criteria that you can choose from – including ‘Mail from specific people’, ‘Large mail’ and ‘Old mail’. To create your own search criteria, scroll to the bottom of the window, click ‘Create a custom Search Folder’, click the Choose button, name this folder, then click the Criteria button.
You’ll now see a new window with three tabs (Messages, More Choices and Advanced). The first tab lets you search for specific words contained within the subject line and/or body of the email. You can also narrow this choice to emails you’ve received from or sent to specific people.
The More Choices tab lets you further narrow these criteria (see screenshot). Similarly, the Advanced tab has options to see emails sent after specific dates, emails where you’ve been Cced/ BCCED into, and so on. When you’ve finished setting your criteria, click the OK button on all three pop-up windows.
You’ll now see a Search Folders dropdown menu at the bottom left of Outlook. Click this to see the search folder you created. All the emails that meet the criteria you set will appear here.
If Search Indexer isn’t returning results from secondary hard drives or partitions, it may not have permission to access them. To check this, open a new File Explorer window, right-click the drive or partition you want indexed, then select Properties. At the bottom of the window, ensure the ‘Allow files on this drive…’ option is ticked (see screenshot), then click OK.