How to search for symbols / special characters in Outlook email subject?

I have a number of emails in my Inbox with square brackets in the subject line.

I want to search for these in Outlook so I can see how many of those emails I have and what they are.

Outlook simply refuses to search based on a symbol.

I have searched a lot for a solution for this and keep being redirected to this Blog post:

Which suggests that you can simply use the "Advanced search". However this DOES NOT work.

Searching for the word "test" works as expected. And as you can see I have emails with the word [Test] as the subject and also with the word [ Test ] as the subject in the search results. (two in sent items, two in inbox)

Searching for a square bracket character in that same inbox brings back no results

Using "Advanced Find" as per all the answers online, including a few on this site, doesn't work.

Using the "Advanced" tab in the "Advanced Find" menu, also doesn't work.

Tried on Outlook 2016 and Outlook 2019

I am losing my sanity trying everything for this. I can't believe that Outlook would deliberately ignore all special characters and symbols in every type of search, but it appears that it does.

1 Answer

According to my tests, it could work normally like below:

But by default, it wiould only search the "Inbox" folder but not the subfolders under it. If your mail is actually located in a subfolder, agree with spikey, it's recommended to choose "Browser" and check the "Search subfolders" option to test.