Outlook search not working in an Exchange environment

Within Outlook, the search functionality may cease to work or only search a small amount of time, because of a corrupt Index Catalog on the exchange database.

In order to rectify the issue there is a process that can be followed in order to rebuild the Index on the exchange server.

First, you will need to login to the exchange server and stop two services:

• Microsoft Exchange Search
• Microsoft Exchange Search host Controller

Next, browse to the folder that contains the exchange database (this will have the file type .edb). Within that folder, you will find a folder that has a long random string as its name.

You can either delete or rename the folder (renaming being the safer option until the process is complete). Once this has been deleted or renamed please restart the two services that were stopped:

• Microsoft Exchange Search
• Microsoft Exchange Search host Controller

After a few minutes you will notice another folder being created that has a long random string as its name. This is the new Index folder that Exchange has created. This folder will take a long time to finish populating the new index.

To find a rough time to completion, you can check the previous folder size, then make a note of the new folder size after 30 minutes. Example, if the old folder is 10GBs, then after 30 minutes the new folder is 1GB, it’ll take roughly 300 minutes to complete the new index.

Once the process is complete, you can then choose to delete the old index folder if you have not already.