Hey everyone, Daniel here from TwinBytes with another quick tech-torial for you.
This time on the email address autocomplete contacts.
If you're not familiar what that is, is when you go to create a
new email. As soon as you click in here to type in an email address it automatically shows some
recent people that you've contacted. As you start spelling out somebody's name it filters it out
to show those people with the similar name that you've contacted recently.
What people mostly don't know is that there's a limit to a thousand addresses that are contained in here
and it keeps deleting the oldest ones you haven't used and making room for the new ones to appear.
So unless you go into the address book and go into
create a new contact. They're not going to be in your outlook in order for you to back up.
So when you do your backups of your emails it's not going to include the contacts;
and you're going to find out when it's too late that all your contacts are gone. So if you want to
keep them, you're going to want to save them in your address book; because otherwise, it's
a long tedious process to back up and restore them which you're gonna find out in this video.
So there's two methods of backing up and restoring your contacts.
One is if you're on an old version of Outlook 2007 or before, which hopefully nobody is.
So we're going to assume you're on a newer version now, or if you're using a POP email account
and I'm not going to get into explaining what all these things are, but if it's a POP
account, you'll have what's called an nk2 file. You can browse to this location on your computer
and just copy that file and of course your computer has to be working at that time or recover
that file in one method or another and then simply paste that file in the same location on your new
computer, or on the same computer after it's been formatted in a fresh install of Windows and Office.
If you're not using POP and it's one of these other type of accounts such as a Microsoft 365
Exchange server or IMAP, then it's going to be using a database type format, which I'm going to
show you how to do that here. There's a link in the description as well this website that tells
you exactly how to go through this process although the steps may have changed slightly
The first thing they tell you is to click on the link to take you to this website
and to run an executable which we do not see here. Things have changed a little bit, so what you want
to do is click on the April 2017 release and by the time you see this video it may change again
but you're looking for the release of the MFCMAPI.
When we click into that, scroll down a bit, there's a few options.
We're looking for an executable and it's of the MFCMAPI.
Now you got to make sure that you choose the right one depending on the version of Outlook you're using.
If you're using a 32-bit version, which most likely you are, you're going to want that one.
Otherwise if it is 64-bit you've got to make sure you choose this version.
Otherwise this process is not going to work.
I'm going to click on the 32-bit and I'm going to open that and run through it.
Simply extract the file and open it. It gives you a dialog box that comes up, you can hit ok on there.
Then you want to go into open the session menu here and then go to log on. Choose your email
account that's associated with the account that you're trying to back up the emails for.
Then hit ok. In the top here you want to find the line that corresponds to your email account.
If you need to you can expand this to make it a little bit bigger and I can see my account over here.
Highlight that. What you want to do is double click on it and you get another window appear.
You've got the root container. So we want to expand that and this is where the instructions
will start to vary from on the website which I'm linking to. It says to go to the top of
the information store or the ipm subtree. We don't really have any of those things here. There's top
of outlook data file. So we can click into there and expand that. Then you want to find the inbox
and I left click on everything first before right clicking on it, but really
you just need to right click on the inbox folder and then click on open associated content table.
You have another window again that opens and what you want to do is look under the subject
column. So we'll have to scroll over a bit here and make that bigger, so we can actually see.
and you want to look for ipm configuration autocomplete.
and we happen to have that right here. You want to right click on that and go to export message.
So this is telling you that it's going to save this to a text file.
Now the instructions are just saying that it opens up asking you to save the file.
But you want to go in the drop down menu here and select the msg uni code.
Then you can hit ok. This is where you get to choose where you want to back it up to.
So once you've found where you want to save it to, because you got to remember where it is so you can
find it again later; save that and okay and okay again.
That's it. You can then close all these other windows and you now have your contacts backed up.
Now to restore your backed up copy of the autocomplete list, we're gonna do
a similar thing kind of in a backwards manner. So you're going to get the same file. Which you can go
through and download again or if you already have a copy of that just copy and paste it to your new
computer or restore that to your computer after you've rebuilt it. We're going to run that file.
Okay the splash message here. We want to go to session and log on again like we did before.
Select our account. Because of course you want to have your account set up at that
time before restoring it. Otherwise it's got nowhere to restore it to.
We'll make this a bit bigger so we can find our account that we're looking for.
We'll double click on that, and we want to drill down through the root container again.
Top of information store, which the wording is a little different, Top of outlook data file.
You want to right click on the inbox and open associated contents table.
This opens up another window. Again we're gonna have to scroll over here and expand the
subject field. You want to look for the ipm configuration auto complete and see if it exists.
If you haven't sent any emails yet from this newly configured email account, then you may not have
this autocomplete file yet. Which is fine. But if you do have it in here
you're gonna want to delete it first. So you can right click and delete the message.
From the drop down menu, you want to go to permanently delete.
Then you can hit ok. So that should be gone. So you do not have your auto complete.
Now from the same window, after deleting it
you can go up to folder and import msg.
Find the file that you backed up and you want to open that, and the default option
drop down menu is correct load message into current folder. Then ok.
Now you should see the autocomplete is in that list again.
That's it to backing up and restoring the autocomplete email addresses in Microsoft outlook
So you can see why it's very complicated and you need to make sure that anyone you want to keep
in your address book, you save them specifically to your address book. Otherwise to back them up is not
that easy. You have to go through this process in order to back them up and restore them each time.
So I hope you found this video helpful. If you did please do give it a thumbs up,
subscribe if you haven't already, and we'll see you in future videos. Thanks so much. Bye for now.