How to recreate contact entries-addressbook from email folders
There are times when all contacts are lost with the result being that the Address Book is empty. One such case is when contacts are stored in an IMAP contact folder with the added description of “This Computer Only” and the OST file is recreated by Outlook.
In order to recreate the email addresses from email messages sent or received, the method to use to perform this recovery is as follows
- use the Outlook export wizard to export the email addresses from the applicable addresses fields to a csv file as per the following BUT only select one email address at a time (multiple addresses are shown to highlight the options)
- once that’s completed, open the CSV file in Excel
- you may have to split the email address column (via Excel split function) for those rows that contain multiple email addresses in the field
- if there are multiple columns as a result of the above step, copy secondary column to the bottom of the column #1 and delete the secondary column after that’s done
- sort the column to look for and remove duplicate entries
- save the CSV file
- open the Outlook import wizard to import the CSV file to the default contact folder
The above steps need to be done once for each email address field in the messages being exported and once for each email folder that you want to export from (i.e. Inbox, Sent Items etc)
Category: Outlook - How To
