Recently, I upgraded from an old MacBook Retina to the new Touchbar model and realized that my Outlook search was not working as expected (read: not working at all), after going through multiple processes that to no avail, I was able to find a sure way to fix my Outlook cache. The process is as follows:
- Quit Outlook.
- Open Terminal (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal) or (Spotlight Terminal)
- Type mdimport -L
- If you see more than one instance of “Microsoft Outlook Spotlight Importer.mdimporter”, delete the Outlook application that you are NOT using, empty it from the Trash, restart your Mac, and go back to Step 1.
- Use the following command with your Mac <username> to re-index your Outlook database:
mdimport -g “/Applications/Microsoft Outlook.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Outlook Spotlight Importer.mdimporter” -d1 “/Users//Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile”
- In the command above the path after “-g” is the default path where your Outlook is installed. The path after “-d1” is the default path to your profile. You will have to substitute your actual paths if you have renamed your profile or installed Outlook in a different location.
- Wait for the re-indexing to finish before you open Outlook. You will see a bunch of crazy stuff scrolling through Terminal, don’t panic, just wait!
