How do I export/save the autofill email address from Outlook?

June 29, 2016 7:51 AM

I am not the best at putting things into contacts and rely heavily on autofill for email addresses in Outlook. I would like to capture all of the addresses that are currently in my Outlook autofill script/file. How do I do this?

Ideally, I would be able to capture and export these autofill addresses to a spreadsheet like Excel. Still fine, I would like to have a usable version of the file that I could then populate into another/different email account. The problem is that I'm not 100% certain that I will be using Outlook, so just having the file to drop into a new Outlook account may not get me what I need (if I can even attach and send it in an email). I've found where the file lives, and have made a copy, but I'm not sure if I can convert or extract the file, or if there is another way to get all of the autofill addresses? I see things on the internet about running assorted extraction programs, which I am willing to do, but am slightly sketched out by random links. I am only medium tech savvy, so I'm not totally sure that the step-by-step things I've found through Googling will ultimately get me what I need. Plus, again, sketched out by random links to download assorted programs and extractors I've never heard of suggested on the content farmish sites that run through steps.

Outlook information:

--I'm running a 32 bit version of Outlook 2010, version 14.07166.5 on Windows 7.

--Autocomplete is working fine, but nothing appears in my suggested contacts as is allegedly supposed to happen for an easy export.

Any help/suggestions/step-by-step instructions would be much appreciated!

posted by HonoriaGlossop to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Use NK2Edit. From the NirSoft NK2Edit page scroll all the way to the bottom and download NK2Edit in a zip File.

Unzip it and run NK2Edit.exe, it will automatically find and open your Outlook.nk2 file. (Or you can open your copy manually). Use the Edit Menu to select all and copy. While there are several copy options all of them simply add the data to Windows Clipboard. So after you copy you need to paste it into a text document. I recommend copying as a simple CSV and importing into Excel.
posted by zinon at 11:58 AM on June 29, 2016

Best answer: I just did this, and it may work for you .

On the File tab, select Open&Export, and then Import/Export.
Choose "export to a file"
Choose "comma seperated values"
The next brings up the outlook file structure, I choose "SENT"
Select where you want to save it.

It exports off to the CSV file. It takes awhile.
Open the CSV file in excel and you'll find the "TO" column lists all the emails. Use the Remove duplicates function to get rid of duplicates. Then you may have to do some more clean up for any where you have more than one person on the TO field.

I hope that helps...
posted by Ftsqg at 1:02 PM on June 29, 2016

Response by poster: I ended up trying both methods just to see how they compared, so if anyone is poking around looking for answers to the same question, here is my experience:

Both methods worked. The NK2Edit is faster/cleaner -- I had over 100K emails in my sent folder, so the exporting via Outlook took quite a long time; I ended up letting it run overnight and I came back to an exported file. I also had to spend more time cleaning up the exported from Outlook version. That said, I also didn't have to download any programs so if you work somewhere where you don't have admin privileges on your computer/are prevented from downloading software from the internet, it is a good option.

Thanks so much to you both!
posted by HonoriaGlossop at 6:54 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]