Tips on Using a Search Folder in Outlook

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For customers that use Outlook, especially those with lots of folders and subfolders, using a Microsoft Search Folder for historic email importing can be helpful.  A Search Folder will aggregate mail based on criteria and folder selection into one new folder that makes historic email importing easier.  Microsoft provides a helpful page on how to do this at this link.

We offer the following guidance below.  Once you have email in the Search Folder, we strongly recommend that you scan through it to be sure the criteria you used resulted in a satisfactory grouping of email for historic email importing.

1. In Outook, determine where to create a New Search Folder.  Below are screenshots from three different Outlook possibilities.  If you still cannot find it, search web on “create new search folder Outlook ###” and insert your version of Outlook.

In Outlook 2013:

In Outlook for Microsoft 365 (subscription):

In Outlook 2007:

2. In the next window, we suggest scrolling down to bottom and choosing Create custom Search Folder. This will make sure you don’t grab things you don’t want for Legacy import and gives you control over criteria and folders.

3. Options at bottom will be presented.  You can choose to specify criteria now, or just click OK to do so at a later step.  We strongly recommend looking through and specifying criteria so that the emails aggregated in the Search Folder are meaningful.

4. An example of the criteria you might want to choose is below. For example, you may only want to copy and move old emails that you have read, as unread messages may be unimportant and would take up unnecessary space and processing time.  Clicking into the Advanced tab reveals many more options for criteria.

5. Name your new Search folder, below is simply an example.  Again, if you want to specify criteria such as only read mail, or who it is from or to, or more, click Criteria. Otherwise, click Browse to choose folders.

6.  We strongly suggest to UNCHECK Search subfolders.  If you leave this checked, you may pull into your All Mail folder Junk and Trash, things you do not want.  You can click to expand folders such as Inbox to have access to nested subfolders you would like to include.  Check the folders that contain email messages you want in your Search Folder. Click OK.

7. At previous window, you will see the folders named that you included. Click OK.

8. If you did not specify criteria yet, Outlook will prompt you one last time to do so.  It is ok to click Yes, but we believe this is to make sure you fine tune your search folder list to only the crucial messages you really need.

9. You will return to the initial window, showing the folder that will be created. Click OK.

Outlook will begin aggregating messages into the folder and you will now see the folder in the list under Search Folders.  If there are a lot of messages to pull into this Search folder, allow Outlook to complete the process.