This post is a little off topic, but I figured it could possibly help others that are stuck in a similar situation.

I seemed to have picked up a virus on my laptop this past week, and as usual.. I figured the easiest / most reliable fix was to just back up everything important and do a fresh install.

After importing my Outlook backup files, I made an attempt to test the email settings by writing an email to someone. I noticed that the autocomplete was not working properly, as no entries had come up when I entered a partial name within the To: field.

I then realized that the autocomplete in outlook does not pull data from your Contacts, but rather from any previous emails that you have sent (which was none considering I had yet to use outlook on the new install).

After a bit of research, I found out that outlook stores this data within a Nk2 file (a file that you cannot manually modify).

Now the obvious solution would have been to backup the Nk2 file before I did the fresh install, thus outlook would have had the same data in that file that it had previously, but that was something that I did not do.. and the file was now lost.

My end solution was using a great application (so great that I just had to write about it) called Outlook Autocomplete Cache. This application is freeware and handles this problem perfectly.

All you do is download the application found at the site below, and run it.. you can select what folders you want to pull data from (sent mail by default) and it will scan all of your sent messages, and then import the addresses into your Nk2 file.

Problem fixed!

You can download this great FREE application by visiting the Rebuild Outlook Autocomplete Cache website

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