Re-Index Spotlight to Fix Outlook Search

1- Quit Outlook. Go to your Finder Settings and make sure that “Hard Disks” is checked so that your Mac’s hard drive appears on the Desktop.

2- Go to your System Settings and go to the “Siri & Spotlight” section

3- Scroll down to the bottom of that section and click on “Spotlight Privacy…”

4- Drag the Hard Drive icon from your Desktop to the box in the small “Privacy” window.

5- You’ll get a pop-up asking if you are sure you want to do this. Click “OK”, then click the “Done” button. Afterwards, restart your Mac completely.

6- Once your Mac has restarted, go back into the “Siri & Spotlight” settings in System Settings, and click on the “Spotlight Privacy…” button again. Press the “-“ button to remove the Hard Drive from the list and then press “Done”.

7- To test that this worked, click the Spotlight button (magnifying glass) near the clock in the top right of the screen. Type something into spotlight, and you’ll notice a loading bar that says “Indexing…”. Once this has finished re-indexing (which can take up to an hour or so depending on how full the hard drive is), you can try closing and re-opening Outlook and try searching in it again.