Is Outlook Search (standalone PST files) completely broken?

All

Been doing some long overdue year end cleanup on a ton of old email, calendar events, tasks etc as they exist in a typical Outlook.com account.

For context - I am running Office 2019 Pro Plus and have created a number of standalone PST file archives (That appear in the tree on the left in Outlook). They are named by year aka 2015 Archive.pst, 2016 Archive.pst and so on.

I managed to populate most of these PSTs successfully by simply running AutoArchive (File-Tools->Clean Up Old Items) and selecting a specific date (Archive items older than) and running the result into the target (Premade) PST.

However - now I am down to my 2021 Archive and a newly created 2022 Archive. I realized about a week ago that the 2021 Archive has been active all the way through 2022 so there is a mix of items from both years. What I really want to do is get ALL the 2022 stuff OUT of the 2021 Archive and over to the 2022 PST.

But before I make any more moves - I thought it would be good to be able to search and VIEW any 2022 item that is in the 2021 file BEFORE I run AutoArchive to ensure the right stuff is moving where I need it to go.

But try as I might - I cannot get the Outlook Search function to show me ANYTHING within this 2021 Archive PST file.

This file has plenty of stuff in it (493559 KB) and I am highlighting its Inbox, putting in search terms both simple and complex. I have ensured these standalone files are part of the overall Indexing. I have checked everywhere that I can to make sure Outlook 2019 is actually searching THIS specific PST and I cannot get a single search to return anything.

What am I missing OR is this Outlook search completely useless when used against a PST file?

Appreciate any tips from the crew in here.

Cheers

Sonic.

Thanks Denis - I do avoid text with my details, but tend to be somewhat casual about images!

Hello

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. But yes - I am completely indexed here and made sure ALL the PST files were included in the indexing passes.

That said - I finally figured out the issue - and it is a bit obscure but makes sense when I think about it:



Here is my 2021 Archive PST (1) - ready to be searched - and I have the Inbox highlighted (2) as the the search target. But in all my PSTs (and my main mailboxes) - the Inbox is simply a top-level folder to my standard folder structure that lies below. AND - the default Search position for Outlook when using this "search" area - is to have the (highlighted) Current Folder" selected.

With that area (and only that area) being searched (Inbox in my case) - there is NOTHING in the Inbox to find so any search criteria will come back empty handed. Only when I switch the option to Subfolders (3) - did I finally see results.

Again - it's very specific and if one was not really paying attention to these control settings - you could go crazy here. It's another case of MS making this way more difficult than it should be - this "should" simply search the entire folder structure of whatever level is highlighted in the PST. And make "Specific Folder" an option if someone really needs to search just one area.

Anyway - solved and all good here.

Cheers!

Sonic.

glad to hear it - I was going to mention sub-folders next! I get caught by that all the time.