Outlook's search feature helps you quickly find emails, contacts, tasks, and calendar items. Use the Search box at the top of the Outlook window to enter keywords and phrases. You can also apply search filters to narrow your results.
How to Use Outlook Search
- Click in the Search box at the top of the Outlook window.
- Suggested Searches will appear automatically, based on your recent activity and message history.
- Select a suggestion or type your own search terms. Suggested searches with a clock icon will return results that include matches in the subject line, message body, and Microsoft 365 attachments.
For more detailed guidance, explore the topic links below, watch the "Search and Filter Email" video, or visit Microsoft's Outlook search support page.
Outlook Search Basics
- When you type words into the Search box, Outlook scans both email messages and many types of attachments for that word or phrase. For example, if you search for "project" either with or without quotes, Outlook will return all messages with the word project, projects, projector, projecting, etc., anywhere in the sender name, subject, message body, or attachments.
- When you type in an email address, for example aubie@auburn.edu, Outlook returns all email messages that contain that email address anywhere in the subject, message body, or many types of attachments, as well as messages from that email address. To limit your search results to emails from an email address, type from:aubie@auburn.edu in the search box.
- When searching for an email by its subject line, the search will be more effective if you search for only a few words in the subject line. For example, to find an email with the subject Spring Planning Meeting Agenda 5/1/2025, search for Spring Planning or Meeting Agenda.
- Punctuation is ignored in the search box. Entering "Spring Planning Meeting." is the same as entering "Spring Planning Meeting" without a period.
- Strings of numbers less than five digits are ignored. If you want to search for 98101, entering 9810 will not return any results.
- To keep Outlook running smoothly, only the first 1,000 search results are returned. If this list doesn't contain the items you're searching for, try a more specific search.
- Searching for terms that contain more than one language may return inconsistent results.
Use Outlook's Built-In Search Features
Outlook includes built-in search filters to help refine your results. Click the Search box to get started. You can select Advanced Search using the filter icon on the right side of the Search box, or use the Search tab on the ribbon, where the Refine group provides additional filtering options. The Search box is located at the top of the window in both the Simplified and Classic ribbon views.
For more details, visit this Outlook support site.
Find a Message with Instant Search
Instant Search helps you to quickly find items in Outlook. The Instant Search pane is always available in all of your Outlook folders, such as Mail, Calendar, and Tasks. For information on finding a message, narrowing your search results, using Advanced Find, and removing the limit on the number of search results, visit this Outlook support site.