Security News > 2021 > December > Microsoft shares fix for broken Outlook search in Windows 11
Microsoft has shared a solution for Outlook users who have been experiencing search issues after upgrading to Windows 11.
"This issue will happen with any account where the emails and other items are stored locally in PST or OST files such as POP and IMAP accounts," Microsoft says on its list of recent issues impacting Outlook for PC. "For Exchange and Microsoft 365 hosted accounts, this issue will affect offline search for the data in the locally stored OST files."
According to Redmond, these issues impact Outlook for Microsoft 365, Outlook 2019, and Outlook 2016.
Per Microsoft, the root cause is the Windows search index being deleted during the upgrade, which breaks search until it gets rebuilt.
If the indexing is still active and takes too long, you can fix Outlook search not returning any results by setting a registry key that disables Windows Desktop Search and tells Outlook to use its built-in search.
Once Outlook's own search engine kicks in, the following message is displayed as an indication that search performance is affected: "Search performance will be impacted because a group policy has turned off the Windows Search service."
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