Hi, I have a very odd problem, but let's start with my setup:

Office 2011 for Mac (Version 14.3.4), running on OSX 10.8.4 (Mountain Lion), with two SSDs (Volumes are called Boot and Data).
Working in a company environment, we only use Exchange accounts.

The good news:
Outlook generally works fine, all emails are there, sending & receiving works, rules work, folders work, no error messages whatsoever, not even in the error console.


The bad news:
The search is completely unfunctional, the only message I get is "No results".


The details:
Since I have a rather small (120GB) Boot volume, I moved the home folder of my account to the Data volume (500GB) and pointed my user account to the new path via advanced options (similar to this tutorial) which works perfectly (at least no problems yet). All other accounts remain in "Boot/Users".

Indexing on both the Boot and the Data volume is enabled (checked via "mdutil -s") and has been rebuilt multiple times via "mdutil -E" to no avail.

Once I found this possible fix concerning group ownership which partially applied to my situation (group owner was admin), I changed "Microsoft Office 2011" and (recursively) all it's content from admin to group owner wheel, but no luck.

Trying "mdimport Microsoft\ Office \2011" I got the following error messages:
  • mdimport[15453:707] Error loading /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Office:  dlopen(/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Office, 262): no suitable image found.  Did find: /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Office: mach-o, but wrong architecture
  • mdimport[15453:707] Cannot find function pointer OfficeImporterPluginFactory for factory BFA4E323-1889-11D9-82C8-000A959816BE in CFBundle/CFPlugIn 0x7fc995542240 </Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter> (bundle, not loaded)
  • (Error) Import: Could not create instance for plugIn 'file://localhost/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft%20Office.mdimporter/'
  • (Error) Import: BAD IMPORTER ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ file://localhost/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft%20Office.mdimporter/

I then found an old (2011) "Microsoft Office.mdimporter" file in "Boot/Library/Spotlight" and removed it. Another try with "mdimport ..." left only the bottom two error messages, but search still did not work.


The odd sidenote:

Edit: MUD folder found, see comments below

Assuming that indexing technically works and seeing lots and lots of mentions of the "Microsoft User Data" (MUD) folder, I tried to find it (or in fact any other database, remnants or files that could be indexed) but didn't. None, nowhere. Not on the Boot and not on the Data volume.

My "Data/User/Documents" does not contain any folder even close to Microsoft Office (not even hidden), adding other identities (I don't want to temper with my main existing identity yet, afraid of loosing all the principally working settings and account information) did not result in the (re-) creation of the MUD folder, even adding a soft link pointing from "Boot/Users/my_account" to "Data/my_account" did not result in any new folder.

I'm now wondering where Office (and Outlook) saves all the settings, caches the emails (if it does at all) and manages my "identity".


The roundup:
  • Outlook 2011 works, while search doesn't.
  • Reindexing volumes didnt help.
  • Adjusting and checking file and folder permissions didn't help.
  • Tinkering with ".mdimport" files didn't help (so far).
  • "Microsoft User Data" folder is and stays missing, with no effect though.

The fineprint:
I know that the issue with the missing MUD folder might be due to the different location of my home folder. I still would like to fix this problem with my current setup (if possible) and not move the folder back and work with soft links (which has some disadvantages and would take quite some time).


My assumptions:
Either there's still a problem with the Office ".mdimporter" files that prevent Spotlight from properly indexing my emails
or
Due to a missing MUD folder, there are no locally cached or saved emails to be indexed.


After long hours of searching, testing, restarting and practicing Google-Fu, I'm out of ideas and options.

Can anyone help me?
Please? :)


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