People App

Hi NVFOX

My name is Andre Da Costa; an Independent Consultant, Windows Insider MVP and Windows & Devices for IT MVP. I'm here to help you with your problem.

Which email provider do you have setup in the People app?

If you its iCloud, Gmail, Outlook.com or Yahoo.com, have you tried signing into those web mail accounts through your web browser then check if the contacts are still there?

In People, click the Settings represented by the gear icon at the bottom
Click Manage accounts
Select your account
Click Delete this account from this device.

Restart People, then set it up again.

If that does not work...

Open Start > Settings > Apps > Apps & features
Scroll down to People
Select it
Click Advanced options
Click Reset

Restart

Check the Store for updates

Open Start, type: powershell
Right click powershell
Click Run as administrator

Type in at the prompt OR Copy and Paste these one at a time : (Hit enter after each)

Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps | Remove-AppxPackage

Get Mail and Calendar - Microsoft Store
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/mail-an...

My setup is with outlook.com. I can open the People app and see some of the people and their email addresses, but not their telephone number, address(es) etc. That has disappeared. I have a second email address that had also access to the People app, but that one is completely gone. I have to reenter this one. However, I can write and mail emails from both. Typing a name brings up the suggested email address(es).

The settings = gear icon is not at the bottom left but on top right. It also seems that the left column is no longer available. 

I have a MS Account, in which I always sign-in.

If I remove the app with the known procedure and then reinstall it, all my people will somehow be back in the app? Where are these data sets anyway? In w7 and earlier I knew where they are, but now they are ?

I know it will be a slow and probably painful process to get things back. I would think I start with the removal and restore procedure, if that makes sense? Do you agree?

Hi NVFOX

My name is Andre Da Costa; an Independent Consultant, Windows Insider MVP and Windows & Devices for IT MVP. I'm here to help you with your problem.

Thanks for the additional information. If you are using a Outlook.com account, then your contacts and their details would be stored in Cloud.

https://outlook.live.com/people/

If you sign in at the following link, you should see them there.

I would proceed with uninstall and reinstall the app, then set up your account again to see if it restores your contacts.

Also, click Start > Settings > Privacy > Contacts

Make sure 'All apps to access your contacts is toggled on'

Hi Andre,

The situation gets more and more mysterious. There are no contacts in outlook.live.com/people. All is completely empty.

Secondly, until yesterday I had some contacts in people, but all did not have any details like address(es), phone number(s), Birthdays etc.

The whole people screen is basically blank since today. I attach an image of what I see:

The only thing I can think of what happened is that something massively went wrong with the app. However, Mail is working alright and so is Calendar. I write emails, and entering a name brings up the email address(es) to insert.

Is there a possibility to ONLY remove and reinstall the People App without affecting Mail and Calendar? It will be a painful process to manually set up all contacts again. Fortunately, I have an old address book program from 1995 which I maintained parallel from which I can look at data records.

The People app just caches files, in this case your contacts from https://outlook.live.com/people/

But if you are not seeing your contacts in https://outlook.live.com/people/, then something is wrong.

I would try setting up the account again.

Andre,

What I've done is to open a Gmail account. I have a Android Phone, Android tablet, a Laptop, and a stationary PC.  After having set up the account on the phone, I did the same from the People App. I now have that Gmail account on the Android devices and the PC but NOT on the laptop yet. Google gave me a real hard time sending some confirmation etc. emails. I believe there were at least 20 of them. They gave a real hard time. Such a nonsense.

Anyway, on my Android devices I have the freshly entered contacts with details, no problems there, but they are only the ones for WhatsApp to fix the problem. These contacts do NOT appear in the People App at all despite synching is on. What I see now in the People App are pretty old contacts mostly from one-time exchanges. They also do not appear in the cloud. When I right click on them in order to delete them the "Delete..." is greyed out. For what reason I do not know. I only can enter additional details. As I said in the beginning of this post - all very mysterious.

My question is whether I should remove the people app via Powershell and the appropriate command, and then reinstall the app from the Microsoft store? I guess I have start from point zero and enter all contacts again.

To mention it again: no contacts are stored in the Outlook.com cloud at all.

There appears to be an issue with the account if your contacts just suddenly went missing.

Click Start > Settings > Accounts > Email apps & accounts

Which accounts do you see listed there?

Andre, sorry for being slow. There are many things going on needing attention. T your question: there are 4 accounts, which is correct: 2 accounts from my provider, 1 Outlook.com, 1 Gmail, which I opened just 2 days ago. That appears to be ok.

I am going to recommend you try contacting technical support so they can check on your account and determine where those contacts went:

https://partner.support.services.microsoft.com/...

I am trying understand how contacts in your Microsoft Account could go missing from...

https://outlook.live.com/people/

Thank you Andre,

the situation changed slightly. All of a sudden two addresses turn up in the https://outlook.live.com/people/ but without details. I entered details and saved them. I have no idea where they came from, but they are valid contacts. The synching process in settings is on. I also refreshed my security settings for MS Account last night. It says that it takes 2 days to get into full effect. 

Maybe, you can give me an advice on how to delete contacts, because as I said earlier, when I right-click on any still existing contact, "Delete..." is greyed out all other commands are working. It is my intenten to get rid of all contacts, which are partially old, and reenter everything new. This appears to me a decent way to overcome the issue.

The other thing is the partner.support. I checked the "Service Agreement". It then came to my mind that I used the same thing some years ago. That one was a disaster! They talked me into paying $149 (otherwise they would not render any help), and in the end after more than 8 hours talking to them, I had NO Solution to the problem. I lost $149, MS did not care about my complex problem or credit the payment, and thirdly, in the end I found my solution after heavy digging in the net. The solution came from Kaspersky, believe it or not. So I won't contact them at all. 

This has nothing to do with you! But with damned MS it has everything to do!