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I need to perform a text search in Outlook e-mails subject and/or body, looking for two-character string that represent a code in our business. The problem is that these codes can assume forms like '@B', '£Z', etc. One of the characters could be a symbol.

For example, when I try to search for a string like '#R', Outlook is giving me lots of results with subject starting with 'R'. It seems like special characters are ignored when specifying text to search for.

I tried surrounding with quotation marks or apostrophes, no way. I tried escaping the special character as '/#' '\#' and '&hash;' but nothing changes either.

How can I search symbols in the e-mail subject?
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

2 Answers 2

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Please take a look:

If the word starts with a special character, then Instant Search will ignore this special characters as the index of Instant Search is word-based only. In that case, you’ll need to use Advanced Find instead. When you want to include words which start with special characters in your search query, you’ll have to use the Advanced tab of Advanced Find.

Open Advanced Find (shortcut key: CTRL+SHIFT+F) Select the Advanced tab Create the following search query Field: Subject Condition: contains Value:

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Of course you’ll replace with your own search phrase containing your special characters.

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    That worked fine! Well, it requires a bit more input than standard search but don't see other ways :) thanks.
    – ManuelJE
    Jan 18, 2016 at 11:20
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    NOTE: If you want to search subfolders with this (for example, an "archive" folder within the main inbox folder), you need to click "Browse" in the top right of the Advanced Find window posted by duDE, then check the box in the bottom-left that says "Search subfolders". Search me why that's disabled by default . . . Jan 27, 2018 at 0:12
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    Doesn't work. I used the "Advanced Find" tool to search for email subjects containing a square bracket in the subecjt, it doesn't bring anything back even when there's dozens of emails with a square bracket in the subject. May 5, 2021 at 14:29
  • Italian users should type CTRL+SHIFT+T to enter the advanced search. I suppose with other languages it's the same, just translate "Find" in your local language and pick the first letter.
    – ManuelJE
    Nov 18, 2021 at 9:58
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    @KAE I've just checked this, use the "Advanced" tab, it should do the job. When you do it in the "Messages" tab it's apparently ignoring the '%'.
    – ManuelJE
    Feb 9, 2023 at 13:55
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Yes, searching for special characters seems like a lot of work. We are able to do regular searches for things such as d4 , smith7 , h25 so I think I will use codes that are strictly alphanumeric in the subject lines and bodies of emails to make searches easier.

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