Outlook Suggested Contacts: What are they used for?

If you have installed Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010, you may have noticed the new “Suggested Contacts” in your contacts area in Outlook. What does it do? How do you use them? What are they for? How do names get there!

Here is the Microsoft Explanation

But here is my simple explanation:

Outlook’s Suggested Contacts do a few things

• Keeps email addresses you have emailed in there if you have not saved them as a contact, but it does not nicely organize them by last name/first name. Consider it a “reply email database”. Otherwise known as your favorite “Auto-fill” (what happens when you open a new email and start typing someone’s name and it auto-populates people you have emailed). It’s Outlook’s “Memory bank” of who you have emailed in the past.
• If you leave one email provider and move to another, getting your contacts in your “auto-fill” can be returned

Con’s

• I think it’s picky because not all the emails I have sent are in there, so don’t depend on it to work 100%
• No organization unless you manually go in and add in the first name/last name.
• Not reliable, but better than nothing

Pro’s

• Not everyone has a CRM system so I appreciate when I move to one computer to the next that I have a way to gathering those email addresses up in one swoop without bogging down my contacts in Outlook.
• If you have an iPhone, every person you have ever emailed gets added to it (yeah, not fun to clean up), but they don’t all show in Outlook.

For a great story on how to disable this, I found this article. How to disable Suggested Contacts in Outlook 2010 by Black.

If you have questions about suggested contacts, synching, etc… please call me for an appt! 612-865-4475

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Category: Outlook Support