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Like many power users, I have tens of thousands of emails in several imap accounts in outlook.

When you search from the desktop in windows 8 (ok, I'm using the classic start menu, but there are other ways to search in windows 8 to yield the same result), you get spammed by hundreds of useless hits on your email instead of it finding the file you were looking for, even if you type in the file name exactly. Forget finding an outlook contact, even if you type in a contacts name exactly, it will instead return every email you ever sent the - totally and infuriatingly useless. If I want to search email, I do it from outlook search.

Since windows 7, I simply have had to stop using the windows search because of this. Now with windows 8, I want to see if there is a way to exclude outlook emails from the search without stopping search within outlook itself. I would pay for a commercial solution to this, as having effectively no way to search for files or contacts, even if you know the exact name, is hugely detrimental to productivity. The best search system I ever had was Quicksilver on the Mac, but sadly this is not available on windows. With quicksilver, it not only put the exact match file or contact at the top of the list, but also remembered it so if you just started typing it would suggest it. Pure productivity. I have often considered going back to Mac just for this one app.

Sadly, after a year of searching - we conclude it is not feasible.

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  • Have you tried removing Outlook from 'Indexing Options'?
    – snowdude
    Oct 14, 2014 at 15:40
  • Yes, then you cant search in outlook either. Indexing options is global, unfortunately. Oct 15, 2014 at 11:27

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