Fixing Microsoft Outlook's Email Address "Auto Complete" Nickname Problem

Microsoft Outlook, on the whole, is a good tool for managing email, contacts, calendars, and so forth. One piece of over-engineering, IMHO, is Outlook's email address "Nickname" feature, in which Outlook attempts to make things easier for you when you begin typing an email address in to the 'To:', 'CC:' or 'BCC:' fields. What happens behind the scenes is that Outlook captures email addresses you type in this way (as opposed to having it look them up in the address book), and stores them as "nicknames" in a file that's located at C:\Documents and Settings\{your user ID}\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.NK2 .

An annoying problem crops up when someone's email address changes, or if their email address in the Outlook address book is different from the one that's stored in the nickname file--also if you begin typing in someone's address and hit 'tab' to autocomplete the entry--sometimes you wind up sending messages to the wrong person.

Typically, the advice I would give to someone facing this problem would be to simply delete the .NK2 file--a somewhat heavy-handed solution, as it deletes all of the nicknames stored (which is not necessarily a bad thing, but most people actually *like* this feature). Unfortunately, the .NK2 file is not editable unless you purchase a utility to do so (which, for about $30, isn't worth it IMHO).

I just discovered an alternate solution, which allows you to simply delete the entries you don't want . To remove a contact from your Outlook address box so that it won't be suggested again, open a new message and begin typing in the address. Use the up and down arrow keys to select the address to be removed from the addresses suggested. When the address to be removed is highlighted, press the Delete key.

I tried it and it works great!