"Something went wrong and your search couldn't be completed" error message when searching from an additional mailbox in Outlook

  • Article
  • Applies to:
    Outlook for Microsoft 365, Exchange Online

Symptoms

Consider the following scenario:

  • You are granted Full Access permissions to a secondary mailbox.
  • You add the mailbox as an additional Exchange account to your Microsoft Outlook for Microsoft 365 profile.
  • You run a search from that mailbox.

In this scenario, you receive an error message that resembles the following:

Something went wrong and your search couldn't be completed.

It looks like there's a problem with your network connection.

When this error occurs, selecting the Let's look on your computer instead option may display the expected search results.

Cause

This is a known limitation of the Exchange Online search service. The issue occurs if an Outlook client uses the primary mailbox user's credentials to run a search from a secondary mailbox.

Workaround

Important

Follow the steps in this section carefully. Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Before you modify it, back up the registry for restoration in case problems occur.

To work around this issue, use any of the following methods:

  • Increase the time that Outlook waits for Exchange to provide search results before falling back to use local search.

    To increase the time, create the ServerAssistedSearchTimeout registry value. For more information, see this Outlook Global Customer Service & Support Team Blog article.

    Type Value
    Group Policy Registry Path HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\policies\microsoft\office\16.0\outlook\search
    Value Name ServerAssistedSearchTimeout
    Value Type REG_DWORD
    Value Data In milliseconds. For example, 5,000 represents 5 seconds.

    Note

    The OCT registry path is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\microsoft\office\16.0\outlook\search.

    You can test by setting the value to 5 seconds. You may find that shorter time also works, such as 3 or 4 seconds.

  • Select Let's look on your computer instead to start a local Windows Desktop Search after every error.

  • Change Outlook settings to stop using the search function on the service. To do this, create a DisableServerAssistedSearch registry key. For more information, see this Outlook Global Customer Service & Support Team Blog article.

    Type Value
    Group Policy Registry Path HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\outlook\search
    Value Name DisableServerAssistedSearch
    Value Type REG_DWORD
    Value Data 1

    Note

    The OCT registry path is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\microsoft\office\16.0\outlook\search.

  • Set the additional mailbox to stop using Cached Exchange Mode, see this Microsoft Support article.

  • Create a shared mailbox as an additional mailbox. For more information, see Create a shared mailbox.