Suggested Contacts: Never lose an email address

Last week I needed to send an email to a contact at Contoso, a company we partner with on marketing materials. Unfortunately, I had not emailed my contact in about a year and I couldn’t remember her name, let alone her email address. Since we had only exchanged a few emails I had neglected to add her to my Outlook contacts. However, with Outlook 2010 I was still able to find her email address quickly using Suggested Contacts.

clip_image001Suggested Contacts automatically keeps track of everyone you send a message to. Unlike the Auto-Complete List that appears when you begin typing a name or e-mail address in the To, Cc, or Bcc boxes of a message, you can search your suggested contacts, and there is no maximum number of suggested contacts (the Auto-Complete List has a maximum of 1,000 entries).

Here’s how I found my Contoso contact. In the Navigation Pane, I clicked Contacts. Then I clicked the Suggested Contacts folder. In the search box near the top I entered @contoso, knowing that my contact’s email address wouclip_image002ld end with @contoso.com or @contoso.net. Sure enough, I found her — Anna Lidman. For good measure, I dragged Anna’s contact business card from Suggested Contacts to my Outlook Contacts folder so I would have it handy in the future.

Thanks to Suggested Contacts I don’t feel stupid when I forget someone’s email address or even their name; I can easily search or browse and find the people I’m looking for.

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Let us know if you’ve had an occasion to use Suggested Contacts and what you think of this new feature.

Josh Meisels
Outlook Program Manager

Office Blogs Comments

Comments: (21) Collapse

  • It would be nice to be able to link the GAL to the auto-complete function without a third-party tool that costs extra...

  • Suggested contacts also catches when I type email addresses incorrectly, because it sees them as unknown contacts.

  • How do export my addrerss llist from OUTLOOK eXPRESS INTO oUTLOOK 2010?

  • I second Blair's comment - it'd be nice to be able to somehow quickly add the new emails to existing vCards - almost all of my suggested contacts are alternate email addresses.

  • I have new PC with Windows 7 Pro.  When all my emails addresses were copied across (from XP Pro) initially once I started to put letter in the To box, suggested emails appeared in a drop down box.  Suddenly a change.  While the PC is on and I'm using Outlook it will suggest those addresses used since last time system powered up.  Once the PC is turned off, they are gone - back to zero suggested contacts.

    Looks as if a box to remember them is un-ticked.  Any suggestions how to fix ?

  • When someone send you a group email and you only see their name, how do you extract their email address from their name and save it to Excel 2007?

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