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Re: [LUG] OT: Harvesting address from Outlook

 

Grant Sewell wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> In the soul-destroying battle that is moving people in the office to a
> Windows Server environment with Exchange, I have come up against
> another question...
>
> Outlook remembers the email addresses of people you have previously
> sent email to.  When you create a new email and start typing in the
> "To" field, it gives you a list of those addresses it knows about.
> These addresses do not have to be in the user's "address book".
>
> Is there either an application that can harvest these addresses, or a
> way to export them (so they can be imported again contacts)?
>
> Cheers.
> Grant.
>   
Ahh a common 'fault' if you ask me.

What you need to look for is an .nk2 file in the Outlook profile, IIRC 
it's in the local profile which is cached on a machine by machine basis 
by default so even if you're running on a machine with roaming profiles 
it may not be backed up.

I found that NK2View was pretty good for getting addresses out of the 
NK2 files.  IIRC it was free too.  You can get it from here:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/outlook_nk2_autocomplete.html

Long term though you might want to consider teaching the users to save 
addresses in their contacts folder on Outlook so it is at least saved on 
the Exchange server (and thus accessible from any machine running 
Outlook or even using Outlook Web Access).

I had a problem with this in the last place I worked at, in the end I 
sent a note out to every user I supported to explain that if their PC 
died this file could well be lost (usually if a PC would BSOD we would 
re-RIS the PC to save time).  I used to tell the users to save addresses 
in their contacts which would take all of a minute, and if they didn't 
they would most likely loose the addresses and that I would not be able 
to recover them (unless I was authorised to spend the time trying to 
recover them by the boss).

Rob


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