As you’ve probably read in my last post, I recently switched to a Mac for my everyday (and night) work, as a necessity. Also as a necessity, I’ve started using the new Office 2011 for Mac, which includes a pretty decent version of Outlook. Coming from Windows, I didn’t have any problems adjusting to this email client, as Mac old timers had when they abandoned Entourage.

I personally don’t like having my entire home folder encrypted using FileVault, but on the other hand I like protecting my data. The easiest way to achieve this is to create an encrypted volume, which you also easily backup by just copying it to an external hard drive. In order to create the encrypted volume, you have at least two ways: using the Mac OS X built-in Disk Utility (check here for instructions), or by using a third party tool like TrueCrypt. I’m not going to debate which is the best options, since they each have their pros and cons. The important point here is that you’ll have all your important data into one encrypted file container, which you’ll mount as a volume when you want to access it. Now, when you do that, you’ll find it under the folder /Volumes/Data, in case you’ve named your volume Data.

Since Microsoft has its own ways, of course it will not let you configure where to save your emails or any other Office related settings. By default it will store everything under your home documents folder: ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data. That will simply not work for me, since I want my emails encrypted and easy to backup. To achieve this, one could simply move the user data folder on the encrypted volume. Here’s how you do that:

• Close Outlook and any other apps in the Office suite.
• Move the ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data to /Volumes/Data/Microsoft User Data.
• Create an alias for the /Volumes/Data/Microsoft User Data folder and move it back to the Documents folder. Make sure it is called exactly Microsoft User Data.

Now, every time you’ll open Outlook it will look for the user identity, preferences, email accounts, etc. in your encrypted volume. This is quite convenient.

BUT, there’s a catch. Office 2011 uses the built-in indexing and searching mechanism called Spotlight. Moving the user data folder to another volume as we just did might break your searching features in Outlook, including smart folders, contact name checks, etc. Luckily there’s a fix for that. First, you need to make sure your encrypted volume is not in the Spotlight’s privacy list. To check for that open a Finder window and go to Applications/System Preferences/Spotlight/Privacy. If the volume is in that list you’ll have to remove it.

This might not be it. Next thing you need to do is to open a Terminal and type:

mdutil -s /Volumes/Data/

You might see that the output will say “Indexing disabled”. Don’t worry. Run this command in the Terminal:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Data/

This will execute the mdutil command as a super user, turning indexing on for the mentioned volume. In a few seconds the spotlight icon in the top-right corner of you screen will begin to animate, as the indexing has been started. Clicking on that icon will reveal a progress bar for the process. When Spotlight finishes, just restart Outlook and you’ll get all your emails searchable in an encrypted volume.

Anyway, don’t forget the golden rule: backup, backup, backup.