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:

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:

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

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

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