Microsoft Outlook Search Feature not searching for partial words or numbers

Question

Microsoft Outlook Search Feature not searching for partial words or numbers

Anonymous

Hello,

I have several associates who are trying to search historical emails looking for invoice numbers in the subject of the email, this invoice number could be anything like #INV123456, if they search for just the numbers, in this case 123456 nothing comes up and in some cases when they search for the whole 'word' nothing comes up either!

These invoices may be in shared folders or inboxes as well but I have spent hours investigating and can't understand why outlook can't find these emails! I have re-indexed the mailbox, turned of cached mode etc, even tried installing a search macro using VB developer mode!

Any help would be greatly appreciated

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7 answers

Answer 1

Anonymous

100% agree. as far as I know, outlook and gmail have ALWAYS been including suffix for search. why the design change?

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Answer 2

Hi @Eleni

I also have the same issue/question

if i understand the explanation correctly microsoft only supports "prefix matching" when searching, but doesnt currently support "Suffix matching" ?
is that right.

i have exactly the same results when searching for Invoice numbers, when i ignore the prefix (such as the INV1234567, and searching for 1234567, and dont get any results when an email includes the full string.)

not sure on the design, but i would imagine prefix and suffix matching should be considered when searching for partial matchs

Cheers

Dillon

Answer 3

Anonymous

i have the same issue, so how can we make it so that outlook DOES search for INV123456 even if we just type 123456? I guess most people ASSUME the search would include suffix too.

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Answer 4

Hi Eleni,

Thank you for the detailed explanation!

It does make sense from the testing I have done myself, but I have some users who are able to search for partial numbers/ words and it does bring up the associated emails that contain those numbers or letters and even highlights it in yellow as shown above too, how is this possible? I have trawled the net for an answer or setting but can't find anything, technically this shouldn't be working for them but it is.

Answer 5

Hello,

Good day.

Thank you for posting in the community.

We've received your query and you can expect to receive a response from one of our community moderators accordingly.

At this point, we appreciate your patience and cooperation. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Community moderator

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Microsoft Outlook Search Feature not searching for partial words or numbers

7 answers