In Outlook 2011, your Identity was located in Documents > Microsoft User Data folder. Identities are now called Profiles in Office for Mac 2016 (now available in. Open the Office 2011 Identities folder. Click the Identity folder. On the File menu, click Get Info, and then click Get Information. Note the size of the database. When you create an Outlook identity, hard disk space is allocated for the data that the identity receives as you work.
By Outlook 2011for Mac has a special folder within the Mac OS X Finder called Office 2011 Identities. Just like it sounds, this special folder contains everything about your Outlook activities. Inside the Office 2011 Identities folder, Outlook stores one folder for each individual Identity. The name of the folder is the name of the Identity. Each Identity folder stores your e-mail, account information, calendar events, tasks, and notes in a database for each Identity.
For Outlook 2011, the structure of an Identity folder is completely new. Outlook now treats each item within an Identity as a discreet file. Each e-mail, calendar event, or task is stored as its own file. This means Time Machine backups for your Identity can take a fraction of a second instead of several minutes or longer as it sometimes did in Entourage. Spotlight searching is much improved as a beneficial side effect. By default, Outlook makes an Identity for you called Main Identity, which stores your first e-mail account’s information. It’s a good idea to learn where your Identity folder is located, if for no other reason so that you know not to delete or move it.
Use Mac OS X Finder application (on your Dock) to navigate your file system. Keep in mind that when you upgrade or add an e-mail account, calendar, task, or note, the information is stored within an Identity. These scenarios illustrate times when having more than one Identity is desirable:. Separation of work and private life e-mail accounts: Your work may require you to have an IMAP account, a Gmail account, and an Exchange account, but you want to keep your personal e-mail accounts, contacts, tasks, and notes from mixing in with your business activities. Use one Identity for work and another for your private life. Keeping jobs independent: Perhaps you work two or more jobs and don’t want to intermingle mail, calendars, and so on.
Making an Identity for each job can help you keep your jobs from getting crossed. Organization support: If you take care of the e-mail for a club or organization, make a separate Identity to keep that mail segregated. Special event: If you manage a special event, such as a conference, webinar, or colloquium, starting a new Identity and e-mail account for the event is the perfect way to manage things.
I've found several articles on Outlook 2011 search not working and it pointing to issues with spotlight. I tried all the proposed fixes including the changes listed here. Nothing seems to be working though these are all geared towards Lion 10.7.
Also, in spotlight on 10.8 I don't see a mail messages, I see Mail and Chats but it has a mail.app logo next to it which I'm assuming is looking at a different directory. How can remediate this problem? Not having search functionality is not acceptable. Hi, Just found a solution to this problem and seems to be working. Open System preferences. Select Spotlight Select Privacy Open a separate Finder window and select 'Documents'. Go find 'Microsoft User data' Then find 'Office 2011 Identities'.
Drag 'Office 2011 Identities' to the other window open 'Privacy' amongst the spotlight settings. What this does is tell spotlight to NOT search in outlook, the very opposite to what you want! However, you then need to highlight the 'Office 2011 Identities' folder and click the - sign which removes it. Your now telling it you want to INCLUDE this folder for when spotlight searches. By removing adding and removing it, its a bit like the classic IT solution of switch it off and on again. It forces the spotlight to re index everything and therefore including outlook for when searching using spotlight. Depending on your outlook file size, it could take hours or even days so be patient.
If you run a search for something to do with outlook in 'spotlight' you should see its indexing with a blue progress bar. Lastly, incase your wondering why this answer involves spotlight and you just wanted a fix for the outlook search and filters, its because outlook for Mac actually uses spotlight behind the scenes. Are you talking about Outlook mail or Apple's built-in mail client? If Outlook, the attached article is your only hope - if it doesn't work you should contact Microsoft as their Spotlight importer for Outlook has issues.
If Apple's mail, then you can do the same thing for your whole hard drive (privacy pane), or open a terminal window and paste this (triple-click and paste it): sudo mdutil -E / Then enter your password. The spotlight index will be rebuilt on your drive; it will take a couple hours to complete and you'll have incomplete results until it does so. Hi, Just found a solution to this problem and seems to be working. Open System preferences. Select Spotlight Select Privacy Open a separate Finder window and select 'Documents'. Go find 'Microsoft User data' Then find 'Office 2011 Identities'.
Drag 'Office 2011 Identities' to the other window open 'Privacy' amongst the spotlight settings. What this does is tell spotlight to NOT search in outlook, the very opposite to what you want! However, you then need to highlight the 'Office 2011 Identities' folder and click the - sign which removes it. Your now telling it you want to INCLUDE this folder for when spotlight searches. By removing adding and removing it, its a bit like the classic IT solution of switch it off and on again. It forces the spotlight to re index everything and therefore including outlook for when searching using spotlight. Depending on your outlook file size, it could take hours or even days so be patient.
If you run a search for something to do with outlook in 'spotlight' you should see its indexing with a blue progress bar. Lastly, incase your wondering why this answer involves spotlight and you just wanted a fix for the outlook search and filters, its because outlook for Mac actually uses spotlight behind the scenes. Apple Footer. This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only. Apple may provide or recommend responses as a possible solution based on the information provided; every potential issue may involve several factors not detailed in the conversations captured in an electronic forum and Apple can therefore provide no guarantee as to the efficacy of any proposed solutions on the community forums. Apple disclaims any and all liability for the acts, omissions and conduct of any third parties in connection with or related to your use of the site. All postings and use of the content on this site are subject to the.