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.
