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Save Outlook 2016 email address auto complete entries & then import them into new Outlook 2016 profile

A company I am working for is currently using Outlook 2016 to send and receive emails through their Gmail email service. All users currently have thousands of email auto complete entries within their Outlook profiles.

These auto complete entries are important since when the users type the first few characters of someone's email address or name the correct email address will appear as an auto complete entry within Outlook (see the screenshot).

Next week I will be switching them over to using Office 365 and will be creating new Outlook profiles for each and every user that will be communicating with the Office 365 server instead of with the Gmail servers.

We don't want for the users to have to regenerate their email address auto complete entries once again.

What can be done to preserver or to regenerate the Outlook user's email auto complete entries so that when the users type the first few characters of an email address or name the email address will be suggested within the email auto complete entry?

I will be willing to purchase a commercial utility to either migrate these email auto complete entries or to regenerate them based upon previously sent and received emails from the current to the new Outlook 2016 email profiles if necessary.

Answer
Answer

Hi Dennis,

 

Based on my understanding, you want to move the Auto-Complete list from the old profile to the new profile.

To achieve your goal, please follow the steps below:

For Outlook 2016,

1. Open the start menu and type in:

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\RoamCache

This will open the Outlook cache folder which contains many files.

2. The autocomplete files start with Stream_Autocomplete and end in .dat

There may be multiple files but the one with the most recent date should be the current one used by the last Outlook profile you created.

In my example above you can see that I created a new Outlook Profile at 11:28 on the 19th April. But my previous Outlook profile was last updated at 10:57 on the same day. The size of the files also gives you a clue to the fact that the latest one is empty.

3. With Outlook closed (very important), copy the full file name of the current (empty) Auto Complete file. You may want to copy this file name into Notepad. Now delete the file. Copy the slightly older file that contains the auto-complete data you need. Finally rename this copy to the file name you just copied (which is in notepad).

You should now have the same files as before but the current auto-complete file should be a copy of the last working one and share the modified date and time.

Now when you start-up Outlook with the new profile it should find all the relevant auto-complete data.

Hope it helps.

 

Regards,

Amanda

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Last updated March 7, 2024 Views 51,408 Applies to: