I want to scan my outlook folders for email addresses where the subject contains specific words

Question

I want to use copilot to scan my emails received within a certain date range were the subject line contains specific words. I would expect thousands of results from the below prompt:

Search all Outlook folders, including Inbox, Sent Items, Archive, and subfolders, for any contacts where the emails subject line or body contains any form of the following:

"X", "XX", "XXX"

Please search back to 1 January 2024 and for each result, include:

• Sender email address
• Sender first name
• Sender last name
• Company
• Folder name (Inbox, Sent, etc.)

Present the output in batches (per year) as a table (Sender | Subject | Date | Folder etc) and then export it to a new Excel file called “Payment Times Reporting – Full Mailbox Extract.xlsx” in my desktop.

Copilot lists only 5 - 10 results each time despite the sources showing many more results.

Answer 1

Hi! It appears Copilot in Outlook is only returning a small sample of results because its search scope is currently limited to your primary mailbox and only retrieves a subset of messages at a time. This behavior is expected, as Copilot is designed to provide conversational summaries, not complete data exports, and it enforces response and scope limits for performance and privacy reasons. As a result, large-scale searches across folders such as Inbox, Sent Items, Archive, and subfolders will not display thousands of entries, even if many exist in your mailbox.

For a full dataset, Microsoft recommends using the Microsoft Purview Content Search feature or the Microsoft Graph PowerShell module. Both allow advanced keyword and date-range queries that include subject and body fields and can export all matching messages to a CSV or Excel file.