2 Easy Tips to Search Emails Based on Recipients in Outlook

Outlook Data Recovery, Outlook Solutions January 5, 2017

Sometimes, when you intend to search emails as per recipients, if you cannot clearly remember whether the recipients are in “To”, “CC” or “BCC” field, it’ll be a bit knotty. In this article, we will introduce 2 easy methods to accomplish it.

There is no doubt that Outlook indeed provides us with a good “search” feature, including instant search, advanced find and search folder and so forth. As usual, to search emails by recipients, most people will enable the “To”, “CC” and “BCC” field, and then input the recipient name, like the following screenshot:

Enable the "To", "CC" or "BCC" Fields in Instant Search

However, this feature isn’t suitable for the case that you can’t figure out whether the recipient is sent to or CC’d or BCC’d because that the relation of the 3 fields is “AND” instead of “OR”. In reality, without using these fixed fields, you still can find emails based on recipients by the following methods.

Tip 1: Via Instant Search

  1. Firstly, click into the search box above the mail list. It will enable the “Search” ribbon.
  2. Then you can set the search scope in the “Scope” group.
  3. Next you can type the concrete search criteria directly in the search box.
  • To search emails sent to the specific recipient, use To: ”recipient”.
  • To search emails CC”d to the specific recipient, use CC: “recipient”.
  • To search emails BCC’d to the specific recipient, use BCC: “recipient”.
  • To search emails in which you can’t define if the recipient is sent to or CC’d or BCC’d, use To:”recipient” OR CC:”recipient” OR BCC: “recipient”.

Search Emails by OR in Instant Search

  1. After typing, emails will be filtered and only your desired emails will display.

Tip 2: Via Query Builder in Advanced Find

  1. In the first place, you ought to activate the “Query Builder” feature for Outlook.
  • At first, search “regedit” in “Start Menu” and press “Enter” key button to access Registry Editor.
  • Then browse to the following keys: “HKEY_CURRENT_USER” > “Software” > “Policies” > “Microsoft> “Office” > “<version>” > “Outlook”.
  • Next create a new key “QueryBuilder” under “Outlook” key.

Create a New QueryBuilder Key

  1. Then you can back to Outlook and click into the search box.
  2. Next click on “Search Tools” button in “Options” on “Search” tab. And from its drop down list, choose “Advanced Find”.
  3. Subsequently, switch to “Query Builder” tab and define the search criteria.
  • Type “To” in “Field” box, choose “contains” in “Condition” field, and type the recipient name in “Value” box.
  • Hit “Add to List” button.
  • Repeat the above 2 steps to add the criteria about “CC” and “BCC” info.

Define More Criteria

  1. After that, pitch on “AND” character and click the down arrow in the “Logical Group” field. From the drop down list, choose “OR”.Change Logical Group
  2. Optionally, you can change the search scope by clicking “Browse” button.
  3. Finally click “Find Now” button to start searching.

Find Now

Cannot Eradicate Outlook Errors

Various Outlook errors have plagued users for a long time. However, even so, we still cannot find out a direct method to entirely eradicate them. What we can do is to take some precautions to protect our Outlook data from serious damage. Apart from paying attention to our daily behaviors to block viruses, we ought to make a regular backup for Outlook data, too. It will help a lot in damaged Outlook data recovery when Outlook gets attacked unanticipatedly.

Author Introduction:

Shirley Zhang is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including repair SQL mdf data problem and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com

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