Confused by Outlook Contacts

[d000hg]

I have always been confused by Outlooks contact management. If I reply to emails, it normally seems to know about the email address from the first couple of letters. But if I look in my address book, none of these are there.

Do I have to explicitly add any email I need? Or are there multiple address books?

[petard]

Outlook "remembers" recent and frequently used email addresses. You can disable that in the settings.

[Curio]

The feature is called friendly names and is not officially supported (i.e you can't get help with it) and is seperate from the 'contacts'/'Address book'. They are stored in an nk2 file in the users profile (%username%.nk2) - incidentally if you copy the file to a new computer you must make sure that the %username% variable matches the new profile, it's one of the features people most like - but as I said it is officially unsupported.

The curious can find more useful info here http://www.outlookexchange.com/Articles/JoyceTang/a7_nkedit.asp

[phishhead]

thanks curio was wondering how to transfer that to laptops after I re-image them. I just tell my users that they will have to re-type the email addresses once then OL will remember them after that.