Clear the Auto-Complete Email Address Cache in Outlook
Outlook 2003 has an automatic completion for any email address that you try to type into the To or CC fields. This feature does not pull from the contacts or address book, because you may have tried to email somebody that wasn't in your contact list, and it will still add that to the auto complete list.
The problem comes in when you put in a bad address, and then every time you go to type in the email address, the incorrect one appears in the auto complete list.
To fix this problem, there are two ways around this. The easiest way is this:
- Start typing in the address that shows up incorrectly.
- Hit the Down arrow key to select the auto completed address.
- Hit the Delete key to delete the auto complete address
The other way is by opening the profile folder and deleting the .nk2 file.
- Open up windows explorer, and paste the following into the address bar:
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Outlook
- Delete the Outlook.NK2 file that you find in this folder.
The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. When he's not coming up with great how-to articles, he's probably writing at his personal blog. This article was written on 12/6/06 and tagged with: Outlook 2003, Microsoft Office
Thank you!
Thank you for this fix but i have an issue, we lost our exchange and had to rebuild it from scratch. now when we recreated the email accounts we ended up having to manually input all the special SMTP address. The issue here was a lot of the old ones where set to a 8 characters username@domain.com (first letter of the first name followed by 7 characters of the last name), but this time around we just used the full last name. Now it only was a issue for people who's her last name was longer than 7 characters and because the user all had the old address in there cache it caused a lot of issue for me as the technician.
my question is i need to clear the whole company's cache, so im thinking of putting that command line into the login script,
/q "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\outlook\*.NK2″
would this work? is there are other way?
Hi,
I have Microsoft Outlook 2000.
I am trying to setup the autocomplete in the email box. When i put in an email address I would like it to automatically go thru the address book and autocomplete the email address.
At the moment it is autocompleting. It is expecting me to type in the complete address. Can you please tell me where the option for autocomplete is in Outlook 2000.
Thanks
Hi dude,
This is a simple but great tip.
Thanks
Raghav
thanks for that
Thank you very much, it's very helpfule article.
Ditto. This was driving me crazy before and I had no idea how to resolve it.
Hi, please please help. I had hundreds of email entries on my autocomplete option for Outlook. However, just now, all the sudden, none of email addresses are autocompleting and it appears they are all missing or gone, but I did not do anything out of the normal. How do I recover these? Btw..I do use ACT if this helps. THANKS
sometimes Outlook 2003 Auto complete is being cleared itself !!!
i want to prevent that in the future
plz help me
thanks,
This is great. I recently moved a bunch of users from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 and I was having a lot of problems with people sending to the old address (SMTP was the same but x400/x500 is different which is what matters to Exchange with local addresses) and this helped me greatly.
Thanks,
Bob Stone
Hi,
I have Microsoft Outlook 2000.
I am trying to setup the autocomplete in the email box. When i put in an email address I would like it to automatically go thru the address book and autocomplete the email address.
At the moment it is autocompleting. It is expecting me to type in the complete address. Can you please tell me where the option for autocomplete is in Outlook 2000.
Thanks
chandrasekhar
Hi Aaron Aiken,
I too faced the problem. Check the files at "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Outlook" in your system. Maybe, you can get some clues from there. If you get then please let me know.
- Prashanth DN Kannadiga
prash_dn@yahoo.com
**** at your own risk ****
For Outlook 2000:
Open up windows explorer, and paste the following into the address bar:
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Outlook
rename the file 'Microsoft Outlook Internet Settings.NICK'
to 'Microsoft Outlook Internet Settings.NICK.bak'
kind regards
John
Thanx a bunch,
Jim
Autocomplete works in my Outlook 2003 but does not carry over to subsequent sessions i.e when I log off and back on to my system, I lose all my autocomplete data. I didn't have this issue with Outlook 2000.
Thanks.
I wrote a batch file that will clear the MRU files and it works on XP.
@ECHO OFF
@TITLE Clear MRU from Outlook
@COLOR 1F
SETLOCAL
:START
CLS
ECHO ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ»
ECHO º º
ECHO º º
ECHO º This script will will clear Most Recently Used lists from your º
ECHO º Outlook files. º
ECHO º º
ECHO º º
ECHO ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍͼ
ECHO.
ECHO.
ECHO 1. Clear Most Recently Used from Outlook.
ECHO 0. Do nothing and exit.
ECHO.
set choice=
set /p choice= Type 1 or 0 and hit ENTER :
if not '%choice%'=='' set choice=%choice:~0,1%
if '%choice%'=='1′ goto DEL
if '%choice%'=='0′ goto END
ECHO "%choice%" is not valid please try again
ECHO.
goto start
:DEL
ECHO Y | DEL "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\outlook\*.NK2″
CLS
ECHO ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ»
ECHO º º
ECHO º º
ECHO º Outlook's Most Recently Used lists cleared successfully. º
ECHO º º
ECHO º º
ECHO ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍͼ
ECHO.
Pause
:END
Sorry, the comment formatting messed up the formatting of the fancy boxes. It took out all the extra spaces.
Bob, I wasn't sure if the above was a response to my issue or a previous one.
Not really a response to anything. I just got a batch file to work and decided to share here is all
Thanks so much!! This was a MAJOR help =)
Hi I'm also having the same issue as Ben
"Autocomplete works in my Outlook 2003 but does not carry over to subsequent sessions i.e when I log off and back on to my system, I lose all my autocomplete data. I didn't have this issue with Outlook 2000″
How do I stop outlook from clearing the cache everytime I log off?
Cheers
Gavin
Thank you for the stright foward simple answer.
for outlook2003
copy %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Outlook and paste in address bar
then copy the file outlook.nk2 in a safe place
when u found that ur cashe has been gone copy the file again to the location %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Outlook
and reopen ur outlook
its a temporary solution
Can clear all errors from our outlook that dosen't work because it slows our new yahoo email beta donwn because now a error shows up thankyou.
Thank you…a real grey-hair fixer!
Have a client with the same problem- open outlook and the nickname file works for the day, close outlook and reopen - it does not work. I have removed the NK2 file already to let it make new - but still does not save. Running exchange 2003/Outlook 2003.
I have Office 2008. It does not seem like there is a file with the extension .nk2. There are a Outlook Data File, SRS, and an XML all with Outlook as the title. Does any one know how to clear the address cache in the new version?