Indexing my Outlook Emails

Perceptive Search can index the email messages, contacts and notes, as well as calendar, journal and task entries in Microsoft Outlook. The Outlook client may connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server, or access them via IMAP or POP3.

Requirements

• Microsoft Outlook 97 or above

Indexing my personal information

The indexing wizard allows you to easily create indexes of personal information including Emails and My Desktop. See Indexing my personal information for details.

Adding Outlook emails to an existing index

If you have an existing index and would like to add Outlook emails, follow these steps:

1. Start Perceptive Enterprise Search - Local Administration Console
2. Open the index you wish to modify. You can do this by either:
   • Selecting it from the My Index Catalog list; or
   • Select File > Open an Index from the menu and on the Disk Directory tab, browse to the folder where the index is stored
3. From the menu, select Index > Content Sources. The indexing rules for this index will be shown.
4. From the list on the left hand side, select Email Rules.
5. On the toolbar, click the New Rule button.
6. Click Microsoft Outlook or Exchange.
7. You will be presented with a folder list similar to that shown in Outlook. If you want to index all items, simply click the Select All button, or you can select individual folders to include or exclude from the index by clicking on the button to the left of each folder. See Email Indexing Rules for more information about defining advanced email rules.
   
   If you wish to index email attachments, tick the Index attachments as well as email contents check box.
   
   Note: By default, Perceptive Search will use the default Outlook profile. You can change to a different profile using the Profile drop down. If you wish to index multiple profiles in the one index, you will need to create multiple Outlook indexing rules, one for each profile.
8. Click Finish to create the rule.
9. Now that the email rule has been created, you must Update the index to have the items referenced by the new rule added to the index. Close the Indexing Rules window and select Index > Update from the menu. If a message tells you that the index is in use, click the Clear button on the toolbar before trying again. See Updating your index for further details.

Modifying Outlook indexing rules

To modify existing Outlook indexing rules, follow these steps:

1. Start Perceptive Enterprise Search - Local Administration Console
2. Open the index you wish to modify. You can do this by either:
   • Selecting it from the My Index Catalog list; or
   • Select File > Open an Index from the menu and on the Disk Directory tab, browse to the folder where the index is stored
3. From the menu, select Index > Content Sources. The indexing rules for this index will be shown.
4. From the list on the left hand side, select Email Rules.
5. Select the rule you wish to edit. It will have an Email System of MAPI, with the profile name as the description. Click the Edit Rule button on the toolbar.
6. You will be presented with a folder list similar to that shown in Outlook. If you want to index all items, simply click the Select All button, or you can select individual folders to include or exclude from the index by clicking on the button to the left of each folder. See Email Indexing Rules for more information about defining advanced email rules.
   
   If you wish to index email attachments, tick the Index attachments as well as email contents check box.
7. Click Finish to save the rule.
8. Now that the email rule has been changed, you must Update the index to have the change reflected in the index. Close the Indexing Rules window and select Index > Update from the menu. If a message tells you that the index is in use, click the Clear button on the toolbar before trying again. See Updating your index for details.

Note that Outlook emails saved to disk as .msg files are indexed using File Rules instead of Email Rules.