AutoComplete Not Working

[MaryMoo]

Got to work this a.m. and all the addresses stored in my AutoComplete are
gone. I checked with our IT guy and he responded: Outlook stores email
addresses in a file when you send to someone so that you can easily select
that address from a listing. When this file gets too large, Outlook will
delete it and start over with a new file. This is why the email addresses
are no longer showing up when you create new emails.
This does not make sense to me. Microsoft Office Outlook 2003.
Thanks

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Because it's not true. When you reach a 1000 entries it will delete the
oldest one. Something else is going on here.

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

You are right. Your IT guy is wrong. After you reach 1000 entries in your
cache, entries are deleted in FIFO fashion. The cache is not cleared.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Outlook's autocompletion feature
was very poorly implemented and is not reliable. An Outlook profile
frequently loses its connection to its cache, and it requires third party
software to restore the file's connection. You can also create a new Outlook
profile from scratch and see if you can migrate your old cache to the new
profile. Read the 5th heading here ("Migrating your NK2(s) file to a new
machine"):
http://www.ingressor.com/autocompletetips.htm

A word to the wise: If you are going to consider your autocompletion cache a
valuable data source and use it as such, then you will need to invest in
software that can maintain and restore it. Microsoft has provided nothing
that will help you with that and has set you up to lose that data
eventually, as you and countless others have now discovered.