How-To recover / export Outlook for Mac "Smart Folder" AKA "Saved Search" configs

Apparently there's no way to export this part of the Outlook config directly. :/

However there are some strings to pull on, which can help:

There are "links" to the config data, in a sqlite DB, which can be seen like so:
sqlite3 ~/'Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile/Data/Outlook.sqlite' 'select * from SavedSpotlightSearch'
(The "UBF8T346G9" above, may vary?)


Even better, the "Smart Folder" configs (including, apparently, those that have been deleted?) are stored in this directory (for recent versions of Outlook for Mac):
~/'Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile/Data/Saved Searches/'

As a cheap hack, here's what I did, to recover the searches from one Mac, and implement on another:

1. Dump the data; ex:
   

   find ~/'Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile/Data/Saved Searches' -type f | while read -r thePath; do echo; echo; ls -ld "$thePath"; cat "$thePath" | tr -d '\000' | tr -cs "[:print:]" '\n' | egrep -v '^[[:blank:]]*$' | sed 's/\([^ (]\)(/\1\'$'\n(''/g' | sed 's/)\([^ )]\)/)\'$'\n''\1/g'; done

   (Removes NULLs; translates non-printing chars to LFs; removes extraneous LFs; puts "sections" on separate lines - a bit hacky, since there's no docs that I can find, for this file format.)
2. Interpret the needed bits; more info below.

Some tips, on decoding the data:

• The data is apparently in two-byte characters - the above is a cheap hack which works in ASCII anyway. :/
• Near the top, is some definitory info, like the com_microsoft_outlook_folderID to search in. (You may be able to deduce the correct folders, without having to figure out how to determine which folder corresponds to which ID.)
• Then the "Smart Folder" name.
• Then, finally, the search / query itself - there's a bit "encoding" here too, so not quite "cut and paste". :/

And since (on a Mac) these are stored in the "Raw Query" format, which uses the underlying Spotlight metadata, here's the official Apple doc on the File Metadata Query Expression Syntax.

Interesting note: This exposes the "Raw Query" syntax (leveraging Spotlight / mdfind), which can be a learning opportunity, for creating more interesting searches (since Raw Query docs are a wee bit sparse).