The Outlook Autocomplete feature is a convenience which maintain a list of all the people you have emailed before and will search this list as you are typing in recipient email addresses.
You will certainly see this feature when you begin typing in a recipients email address; Outlook ‘autocompletes’ the recipients email address based on the address you used before.
Some people believe that the autocomplete entries form your contacts but this is incorrect, the autocomplete and contacts lists are two completely separate lists.
This is a handy feature but can cause problems when you change PC or need to update the entries in the autocomplete list.
I have often had people who I email frequently change email addresses and been frustrated when I accidentally send email to their old email address because of autocomplete.
Fortunately, this is an easy fix which I will detail below.
Turning off Autocomplete
If you want to completely disable the autocomplete feature you can, just do this;
- In Outlook select Tools | Options | Preferences
- Select Email Options then Advance Email Options
- Remove the check mark next to ‘Suggest Names when completing To:, CC: or BCC: fields “
- Select Apply or OK to close all dialog boxes.
Deleting or correcting individual Entries in the Autocomplete File
Removing or correcting wrong entries in the autocomplete, while not intuitive, is simple enough. The process for correcting entries is simply to delete the wrong entry and then send and email to the correct email address in Outlook, essentially adding the correct entry back into the autocomplete file.
To delete an entry;
- In Outlook, begin composing a new email message by typing the first few letters of the recipient name you want to delete.
- When the user you want to delete appears in the autocomplete list, use your up/down arrows to move the highlight onto the proper entry and hit your delete key.
This will immediately delete the highlighted entry from the Autocomplete list.
Transferring your Autocomplete settings from one machine to another.
If you are using Outlook as your email client with Exchange 2003 as your email server you can easily move from one machine to another and have all your email , tasks and calendar items automatically follow up. Unfortunately the autocomplete settings are stored in a local file on the workstation and must be moved manually.
To move your Autocomplete settings from one machine to another, do the following;
- If you have Outlook open, close it.
- Turn on the viewing of hidden files by double-clicking My Computer, then select the Tools menu Folder Options and View.
- Under Files and Folders | Hidden Files and Folders check ‘Show Hidden Files and Folders and be sure the ‘Hide Extensions for known Files Types’ is unchecked. Close the Tools dialog to return to My Computer.
- Access your profile information by selecting Start | Run. In the run dialog box type in %userprofile%.
- Double-click Application Data | Microsoft then Outlook.
- Locate a file that ends with .nk2, normally default.nk2 and copy this file from the old PC to a USB drive.
- Repeat the same process on the new PC and copy the file from the USB drive to the same location on the new PC.
Note—this will NOT merge the two files but overwrite the file on the new PC with the information from the old PC’s *.nk2 file so if you have entries in autocomplete on the new PC this process will overwrite these entries with the autocomplete file form the old PC.
Completely clearing the autocomplete file
Let’s suppose you just move to a new PC and assumes the profile of the old user. Unfortunately, you will inherit the autocomplete file from the old user.
To completely delete or reset the Outlook autocomplete, simply follow the same steps in the section above to transfer the autocomplete settings and just delete the existing .nk2 file—remember to first shutdown Outlook.
