Windows 7: Problem when searching Outlook emails

My problem is this. Today is 10/21/2010. When I do a search in Outlook for a recent email that I have received this week, it will only locate emails from prior to 10/15/2010. I must have done something wrong, but have no clue. Anyone?

As a test, can you try searching for emails that are more recent than the date you listed? Is this Outlook 2010? Have you changed any settings recently?

Check your indexing.

I am running Windows 7, Outlook '07 and really don't recall changing anything recently? I went to the Indexing option and find all of my "In" folders are check marked, which I hope is what I would want?

And to the idea of searching for an email more recent than the date, I tried to search for one email received about an hour ago, by entering the senders first name (part of the email address) and nothing shows, just ones prior to the 10/15 date?

I did more checking around and it seems that this is a common problem but can't find a "one-size-fits-all" solution. Various things people have tried that seems to work sometimes is everything from letting Outlook run overnight to creating a new profile and even moving the index file.

Erica647, thanks for the input.

This almost renders Outlook non useable anymore. I sure hope some MS experts can help explain what is happening??

I just had this problem recently. I broke the screen on my notebook and used another notebook for about 6 months. I dont recall ever having an Outlook search problem with it last year. It took me a few months to get around to replacing the screen and when i finally tranferred all of my data back to this notebook

Outlook kept giving me a message when i tried to perform a search that the index had not completed. I saw suggestions to leave the computer on for a couple of days until the index completed - Not willing to wait a week! I have over 3 GB in my personal & archive folders.

First suggestion that i found was to close Outlook and go to indexing options in the control panel and rebuild the index. I did this but there was no change.

Finally found somthing advising to check the status of Indexing Services & Windows Search in Control Panel under Programs and Features: Turn Windows Features on/off. Indexing Services was checked = ON, but "Windows Search" was not checked = OFF, so i checked "Windows Search" and restarted the computer.

Once I did this Outlook was able to index in not much time at all and my searches were working again. I am not quite sure how this setting was changed as I did not have a problem before letting this computer sit unused except for hooking up to my TV to watch movies for 6 months; I'm thinking somehow an update might have made changes that affected these settings.

I can't survive without a functional search in Outlook!