Creating Search Folders using the Query Builder in Outlook 2010

For one of my clients, I receive error information via email.  At times there can be hundreds of error emails, so I try to take advantage of Outlook to put things into folders and leverage search folders to see the types of errors that are happening.

I found this post that describes how to enable advanced queries in Outlook 2010 using the query builder.  The query builder supports the condition I was looking for, which is to check for messages containing two different search strings, including messages where only both are present.  And I found this post that described how to create a search folder from the query builder.  Unfortunately, it was describing Outlook 2007, and the steps to create a search folder didn’t work in Outlook 2010.  So this blog post connects the dots on how to create a search folder using the query builder in Outlook 2010.

First, to enable the advanced query builder, you must add a “QueryBuilder” key to the registry for your version of Outlook, which is under    

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook

See the other post for more detailed instructions on enabling the query builder and some description of its capabilities.  Next, right click on the Search Folders heading to create a new Search Folder:

New Search Folder

which will show the new search folder dialog.  On this dialog, scroll to the bottom selection, which is “Create a custom Search Folder” and click on the Choose… button:

New Search Folder Dialog

which will show the Custom Search Folder edit dialog.  On this dialog, click the Criteria button:

Custom Search Folder

which will finally produce the dialog where you can see the query builder and enter your criteria:

Search Folder Criteria

From here, you can enter the criteria and back your way out through the dialogs to add your search folder.

2 comments: (+add yours?)

Custom Software Development Services said...

Hmmm, its means you are using MS office 2010, but I am still using Ms Office 2007, its very easy and nice to use..thank you for the post..

Anonymous said...

This is great, I'd already read the other post but yours gave me the confidence to actually do it. I'm not an advanced user and look to people like you to help me out. This is going to massively improve the effectiveness of Outlook for me as I deal with a very large mailbox. Many thanks.