QuickTip: Finding an E-mail Needle in an Outlook Haystack

If you're one of those people who reads an e-mail, promptly acts on it, and then immediately deletes it, this post won't help you at all. But if, like me, you have dozens of folders full of thousands of messages, this post's for you.

I rarely delete a non-spam message, for good reason. I've had several situations, both for work and personal reasons, when an e-mail from many months before (and occasionally even years) has been a lifesaver. And I'm pretty good about organizing them into folders so my Inbox isn't too out of control. But that causes another problem, when I can't remember what folder I put a particular message in (or I accidentally dragged it to the wrong one—more often than you might think...)

So rather than clicking on each and every folder to try to find it, I use Outlook's great "Search All Mail Items" feature, which, in Outlook 2007, you can find by clicking the arrow beside the search box at the top right of the screen. (In Outlook 2003 you have to click the Find button first, and it will open a new section with a "Search In" dropdown box.)

This option will find all messages with the chosen keywords in your Inbox, Sent Items, personal folders, Calendar, and even other Outlook data files you may have open. It doesn't search your Deleted Items folder by default, but you can change that by selecting the Search Options item from the same menu. (It never searches Junk Mail.)

If the search returns too many messages, you can add specific criteria to filter the results by clicking the double-arrow to the right of the search box. It gives you some default fields, like To and Subject, and there's also a dropdown list of other criteria you can choose from.