Outlook 2010 Search Indexing

Indexing is a phenomena which saves the location of files and other content to make search real fast. It is very beneficial especially when you have loads of files or dealing with a lot of content. Windows has an inherent quality of indexing different locations including Outlook folders, and content. Once Windows 7 has the location from the index, then you can retrieve the data by moving directly to the location without invoking the search process. In this way, indexing can be considerably faster than scanning through all the folder to find the content or particular file. Outlook content, files, and folders have also been indexed consistently, if you want to change the way Windows 7 has been indexing Outlook 2010 content, then this post will help you a lot.

By default Windows 7 automatically indexes Outlook folders and files, when you type search keyword in Start menu, search it also show results from Outlook content, such as, emails, attachments, contacts, calendar, tasks, folders, etc.

If you want to change it, lets say you want to disable it, then launch Outlook 2010 and from File menu, click Options.

It will bring up Outlook Options dialog, now from the left pane select Search, you will see bunch of options here, now under Sources, click Indexing Options.

Indexing Options dialog will appear, you will notice that Microsoft Outlook is already included in the Indexing Locations. Click Modify to change the indexing location.

It will lead you to the Indexed Locations dialog, now disable the Microsoft Outlook option, and click OK to continue.

Upon click, you will be brought back to the Indexing Options dialog, here you can see that Outlook is excluded from Indexed Locations. For configuring advance indexing options, click Advanced. But before going further, please ensure that what type of indexing options you need to change, as it affects indexing of all file types. So be very meticulous before configuring advance indexing options.

In Advanced Options dialog, from File Settings you can enable the option for indexing encrypted files and Treat similar words with diacritics as different words. If you have been facing a problem in searching files, you can rebuilt the index by clicking Rebuild option. Under Index Location, you can specify index location. Click File Types tab for manually select files to be indexed.

Here you can select the files you want to be indexed, it includes all the files which Windows has been indexing, so look for the Outlook files first and then enable/disable the indexing option. Once configured Indexing Options, click OK.

Close Outlook 2010, and now check if Windows is still indexing files, click Start Orb and type any search keyword. You will notice that Outlook content is no more indexed, thus showing no results from Outlook content.

You can also check out previously reviewed guides on Outlook 2010 PST file & Mail Alert notification from Specified Sender.