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Troubleshooting: Search Not Showing Some or Any Email Results
Who is this article for?Mail Manager Specialists attempting to resolve the issues.
Mail Manager must be installed.
This article is designed to help troubleshoot and diagnose the root cause as to why when users search in Mail Manager the search result is only showing some or no Emails.
Note: This article is closes related to Troubleshooting: Unable to search for SharePoint Locations and Troubleshooting: Background Indexer has stopped working.
This article outlines:
- Check Chosen Search Preference
- Check Index Status
- Reboot the Machine
- Recreate Index Folder
- Capturing Diagnostic Logs
Check Chosen Search Preference
Firstly, ensure that "Enable Searching" has been selected. Navigate in Mail Manager Tool > User Preferences > Search here you will be able to identify what search preferences have been chosen and decide if it is necessary to change them.
Only search locations I use (recommended)
- Suitable for users who file to a relatively small number of locations and rarely need to search a location they haven't filed to.
- Shortly after filing to a new location (or marked as used) it will be able for searching.
Search all available locations
- Suitable for users who need to search across all locations whether they have filed to me or not.
It may be that you have a chosen search preference of Only search locations I use, which needs to be changed to Search all available locations. If in doubt as to what your search preference should be speak with your Mail Manager administrator. If you are searching in the Classic Search View it may be that you have 'My Items' as a selected filter, you can change this to 'All Items' at the top of the search view as seen in screenshot below:
- Note that Mail Manager will index locations with a priority of those that are used first. If you are busy using locations, this can push unused locations back down in the queue. If you are looking to get all locations indexed, regardless of them being recently used, you would need to mark all the locations as used to help prioritise them to be indexed.
Check Index Status
You can check the Indexer Status from the Dashboard within Mail Manager.
To do this navigate to Mail Manager > Status > Search
Ensure that the Indexer is Active and not Paused (to reactive it you can select resume indexer and it will become Active again).
If either the Index Status is Unknown or the Last Updated date isn't within the last 30 minutes or so then reboot your machine.
Reboot the Machine
Attempt to re-boot the machine if you have not already done so. If the machine is not shutdown at the end of the day, but instead left in sleep mode, then it may not have come out of suspense properly. This has commonly known to help resolve the issue if emails are showing up to a certain date. If this did not resolve the issue the advise the following troubleshooting steps.
Recreate Index Folder
Note that this will wipe out the current index you have so if it is just slow at indexing, but it is working, it might be prudent NOT to follow this step unless specifically advised to by Support.
If a re-boot to your machine did not help to resolve the problem attempt to recreate the index folder:
- Close Outlook
- Check in the Windows Task Manager that no Outlook and Mail Manager processes are running. If they are, manually end them.
- Go to 'Run' (Windows Key + R on the keyboard)
- Type in %LocalAppData%\28Hands\Mail Manager
- Rename the folder called Index (ie IndexOLD)
- Restart Outlook
Note: If partial emails are being searchable it maybe that the index has not yet completed, on fast connections to a network file store, this has been known to take up to 24-28 hours but on slower remote connections or depending on the number of locations and emails involved, it has been known to take weeks to complete, especially if many people are trying to build the index up at once and/or it's on a remote server or a system such as SharePoint that can limit the number of calls we can make. If many people are trying to build up an index, you may want to set one machine to index on it's own and then have that export there results as per: Indexing files to a new storage device If you have received an error 'Background Indexer has stopped working' then refer to article: Troubleshooting: Background Indexer has stopped working
Capturing Diagnostic Logs
If this did not help to resolve this issue then please advise that the customer send their Diagnostic Logs. If they need help capturing the Diagnostic Logs please follow the guidance in the following article: How to Capture Diagnostic Information for Troubleshooting