Outlook search has improved dramatically in recent years.  By typing a few words into the Outlook search box, every email you’ve ever sent or received which contains any of the typed words will be retrieved for you in a matter of seconds.

The problem is that those searches can be quite long.  What if you’re looking for the quote that you sent last month to your biggest customer, Smart Dolphins Plumbing Corporation?  You might try typing “Smart Dolphins Quote” into an Outlook search, but that would show you every email that you’ve ever sent containing any of those words which could be thousands of results.

To solve this problem we need to get more granular by understanding Outlook search syntax.  By searching for “Smart AND Dolphins AND Quote” you will find only the emails that contain all three of these words.  AND is called a logical operator and must be in upper case for Outlook to recognize it.

Here’s a great article from Microsoft explaining many more uses of search syntax.

Have fun searching!