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I’ve been Googling to find a solution to this problem, and can see that many other people have asked this same question, but so far have not found any answers that were useful (either to the person posting the query or to me).

At some stage recently I must have accidentally moved one of my Outlook folders to somewhere else. You’d imagine I just accidentally pushed it inside another folder, but manual searching has so far not found it. It's an important folder containing numerous sub-folders.

Using the normal Search All Mail Items facility for likely terms, I can find numerous mail items from within the sub-folders (thus confirming I have not deleted it/them). I can open these items from the search results box, and Properties tells me the name of the folder (though I already knew that from the search results box). But it does not give me any directory tree that I could use to trace back to the folder’s location.

I’ve tried searching on terms from the folder name, but this does not turn up anything relevant – evidently Outlook only searches in mail items, not in folder names.

Does anyone know how to solve this problem?

... a few hours later:

OK, our IT support guys have found the answer. You have to:

(a) enable instant searching in Outlook (took a couple of hours to complete indexing), and

(b) enable Windows Desktop Search.
The latter will search for a folder name, and also displays the directory tree for the folder.

Lost folder found, problem solved.
Cheers.

... and for the person who asked: Windows XP Pro ver 5.1; MS Office Outlook 2007; Unicode / Microsoft Exchange; and from memory I think it's a POP account but this info seems to be hidden from users at present.

Oliver Salzburg
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Jeff Gates
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2 Answers2

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... a few hours later:

OK, our IT support guys have found the answer. You have to:

(a) enable instant searching in Outlook (took a couple of hours to complete indexing), and

(b) enable Windows Desktop Search. The latter will search for a folder name, and also displays the directory tree for the folder.

Lost folder found, problem solved. Cheers.

... and for the person who asked: Windows XP Pro ver 5.1; MS Office Outlook 2007; Unicode / Microsoft Exchange; and from memory I think it's a POP account but this info seems to be hidden from users at present.

Jeff Gates
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None of the answers here or at How can I find a lost folder in Outlook? or How to find one specific folder in Outlook among very many folders? worked for me in Outlook for Mac v. 16. This method, which is not perfect, worked for me:

  • Right click/Control click on any email to bring up a long context menu. Alternatively, select an email and use the Message menu on the menu bar.
  • Scroll down in the menu and choose Move.
  • Choose either "Choose Folder..." or "Copy to Folder..."
  • In the popup dialog box, enter the lost folder name in the search box at the top.

This should bring up a list of folders containing the same name. If you have a deep folder hierarchy, or if you have long folder names, you might not be able to see the entire path to the lost folder, but you will get part of the path, and that may allow you to figure out where the folder is.

Mars
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