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Old 07-19-2013, 09:11 PM
angelsix angelsix is offline Outlook 2010 is hiding some of my contacts Windows 7 64bit Outlook 2010 is hiding some of my contacts Office 2010 32bit
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Outlook 2010 is hiding some of my contacts
 
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Unhappy Outlook 2010 is hiding some of my contacts


This is driving me crazy. Some of my Outlook contacts are not showing up in the Outlook contact list. Neither a manual search (scrolling down the contacts list), nor typing the name or email into the search box will find them. But, I know Outlook has them, because if I start to type in the person's email address in the 'TO' line, Outlook will fill in the name and email address.

I've just been dealing with two of these contacts. In the one that's still missing, if I right-click on the name/email (where Outlook filled it into the outgoing email 'to' line), and select "look up Outlook contact" I get an error popup, "Could not find an Outlook contact with this email address." So even though Outlook just filled it in, Outlook denies knowing anything about it.

This problem became acute when I trusted MS and set up an outlook.com account, and then installed the Outlook add-on to integrate the Outlook.com account with Outlook 2010. I hoped that deleting the Outlook.com account, and deleting the add-on software, would solve the problem. It hasn't.

There is a random aspect to this problem ... most of my contacts do show up in my Outlook 2010 contact list, just not all of them.

This is particularly frustrating, because I use a Rule to have all emails from sources not in my Contact list routed to a different folder than the Inbox. That way, spam, etc., doesn't make me miss emails from sources I care about. Now, for these suddenly semi-missing contacts ("SMCs"), their messages are also being routed to the alternate (low priority) inbox.

The other SMC has now magically reappeared in my Outlook contacts. On that one, likewise, neither a manual search nor an automatic search could find the entry in my contacts list. But, when I right-clicked on the name & email that Outlook had filled in on the "to" line, and selected "look up Outlook contact", Outlook found the contact and showed it to me. I made a few changes, saved, and voila' -- Outlook now shows that contact in my contacts list.

On a side note, in the "suggested contacts" in Outlook 2010, some of my existing contacts (that do show up in the main Contacts folder) are listed. I have a bad feeling about that.

I use Google as my main contact list. I've been using CompanionLink to coordinate my Outlook Contacts list with my Google Contacts list. CompanionLink still runs happily, without error messages. But, apparently it has access to the Outlook 2010's secret hiding place, because it doesn't delete the contacts from Google, so CompanionLink thinks they're in Outlook. Only Outlook denies that they're in Outlook.

I think I had a related problem some time ago with one of my contacts in Outlook 2010. Outlook routinely would refuse to send mail to that person, with some irritating, computer gibberish message which at first sounded like the problem was at the recipient's end, but eventually turned out to be a problem in Outlook. As I remember, I deleted the contact in Outlook 2010, and in Google, then re-created the contact. I could try that with the missing Outlook contacts, if I knew which ones they were, and if Outlook would let me have access to them.

Somewhere, a long time ago, I read something about this, I think. As I remember, Outlook would prefer to be running in some big enterprise, with an enterprise contact list, so sometimes it goes ahead and creates a secret enterprise contact list and then there are conflicts between that and the actual contact list.

Somebody else whose contacts were not showing up in Outlook posted something on this board a while ago, and someone asked whether their accounts were SMTP, IMAP, or something-else-I-forgot. I don't have a clear understanding of SMTP vs. IMAP, nor why that would matter, but just checked and all of my "account"s in Outlook 2010 are listed as SMTP/POP.

So, if somebody could help me get all of my contacts showing up again in Outlook 2010, I'd be grateful.


You can probably skip the rest of this post -- it's just complaining. Maybe the administrators will delete it.
If Outlook 2010 is creating a secret contact list, it's a good example of why some people end up hating Microsoft. Outlook should not create a secret contacts list unless asked to in settings, and there should be a simple, easily found way to tell Outlook 2010 to STOP doing that if this feature gets turned on.
I really miss Eudora, which never did anything like this to me. When the developers abandoned Eudora, I stayed with it a long time, but eventually decided I had to pick another email client. I picked Outlook 2010, thinking this transition would be a giant pain (it was), and I didn't want to do it twice. So, since I have Office 2010, why not go with the email program written by Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world. Surely they would want their flagship suite to be wonderful to use. It hasn't been, and now this current problem is making that worse. I'm glad I didn't transition to Penelope, Pegasus, Mailforge, or Thunderbird, all of which have been essentially abandoned by their creators (although Thunderbird is still getting some support just to keep it "stable"). I read that enterprises are transitioning to online email, which I don't 'get', maybe just because I'm now old. I want my email in my nice big 'desktop' (actually, it's on the floor under my desk) computer that I have built and rebuilt ever since I first decided not to get an Apple computer and to go with Microsoft's DOS instead.
And, I wish Microsoft would stop being so macho/paranoid about Google's Android and stop trying to make us choose between them. We use Google on our Android phones as out contact list. Why not just have Outlook have the option to keep itself sync'd with our Google contacts, instead of making me use a 3rd party program. (But, note, I have been very happy with how well CompanionLink works). I understand that Microsoft wishes their phones had been more popular, but they aren't. We can't use our Outlook contact list on our phones, so why not just let us use our Google contact list with our email program? And, even cooler, would be do the same thing for Apple users with their contact lists. Imagine a corporation so confident that it said "We think our stuff is the best, but if you want to use something else we want to support you to make your life as easy as possible in these difficult times." OK, I know, corporate wars, etc. I read somewhere that there is an old Vietnamese saying, "When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled."

P.s. I 'never' double-post -- post the same message in multiple forums. I tried to post this in the official Microsoft forum. I got a message saying their filters had identified my posting as spam, and inviting me to explain why it was relevant to the Outlook 2010 forum. When I typed that explanation in and hit "enter", I got a "page not found". ... sigh. So, I'm posting here. Maybe it will show up in the Microsoft official forum sometime; maybe not. If it does, and I get a solution there, I'll post it here.
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Old 07-20-2013, 07:03 PM
angelsix angelsix is offline Outlook 2010 is hiding some of my contacts Windows 7 64bit Outlook 2010 is hiding some of my contacts Office 2010 32bit
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Outlook 2010 is hiding some of my contacts
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
Posts: 2
angelsix is on a distinguished road
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I tried running MS Outlook Repair Tool (SCANPST.EXE) on my Outlook.pst. It found errors, and corrected them, but no difference.

I just had some success with a couple of the contacts that didn't show up. I typed their email address into a "To" line. Outlook filled in their name. When I tried "look up contact" it denied having one. But, when I clicked "add contact", it did. One of them was added as a new contact, with none of my other contact info (e.g. address).
The other one, Outlook asked me if I wanted to merge with the existing contact. When I did, I ended up with the full contact, which was nice.
Both of these contacts now are findable in my contacts list. So, that seems like progress.
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