I’m not a Mac user but by boss is. Here’s an issue he ran into, in his own words.
So, spotlight (search) has stopped working on my Macbook. I believe it stopped working, I suspect, when I enabled TimeMachine to back it up. I’ve been following the instructions for how to fix, multiple different methods and nothing has worked. What this impacts is search doesn’t work in Outlook, which is a real pain in the neck. I’ve tried adding and removing the outlook folder from the Privacy settings, using Terminal to tell spotlight to rebuild the indexes. I can see spotlight rebuilds indexes but it still seems to miss it for Outlook. I’d love to see if there’s another solution I can try. Some have suggested removing and reinstalling Office 365 or reimaging the machine. Both of those have mixed results.
Interesting, I’ve had a similar issue on my Mac, no Time Machine set up at all but it lost my Outlook search index. Tried to remove/re-add and it never reindexed. So I wiped the whole index and re-added–that resulted in the index not building at all for days. So I’m upgrading from Mojave to Catalina, as one does when something is finally annoying enough to overcome the annoyance of something like Catalina–we’ll see if that works No fix yet…but the Catalina upgrade isn’t done yet, either.
Hey Ron… when i migrated from one machine to another using the machine transfer tool this happend on my mac… i had to tell spotlight to stop indexing outlook… then exit and then return to system prefs and then tell it to index outlook after a restart and a little time opening outlook all was well.
No fix yet…but the Catalina upgrade isn’t done yet, either.