Searching Current Folder of a shared mailbox in Outlook Desktop returns no results

Last Updated: October 30, 2024

ISSUE

When a delegate with full access permissions tries to search in a Shared Mailbox using “Current Folder” as the search scope, the following message will be shown “Outlook cannot perform your search”. This error appears at the bottom of the message list, and it appears that search did not actually run or returns no results. This issue starts occurring after updating to Version 2403.

STATUS: FIXED

The Outlook Team re-enabled the feature that supports searching shared mailboxes and shared mailbox archives with service search. This change is enabled to the following:

Current Channel - already available starting with build 17830.20138.
​​​​​​​Monthly Enterprise Channel – the feature is on hold for MEC until a fix is implemented for the on prem shared mailbox search issue.

If you mitigated by disabling Download Shared Folders, you can re-enable it. For more information, go to Turn on Cached Exchange Mode.  

Active Issue: Unable to search on prem shared mailboxes when primary mailbox is in Exchange Online.
There is one active issue with the shared mailbox service search feature. The issue is that searching on prem shared mailboxes when the primary mailbox is in Exchange Online returns no results. This issue is currently limited to Current Channel. In order to mitigate this issue, consider putting machines with this issue on Monthly Enterprise Channel or Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel or revert Outlook to a build before this change is available as noted above. We will update this topic when we know a fix will be available for this issue.

Additional Resources

Troubleshooting Outlook search issues