Most of you may remember, that in Outlook 2007 and earlier, all autocomplete email addresses were saved in the *.NK2 file, or in even older versions of Outlook they were the *.NICK file.
The NK2 file (or Nickname file) could be easily identified because it was the same name as your Outlook profile. So if your Outlook profile was called “Work Email” the NK2 file was called “Work Email.NK2”.
This made it easy to transfer that autocomplete data to a new profile.
You would create and log in with a new profile, let’s call it “Personal Email”. This would create a blank new NK2 file called “Personal Email.NK2″. Then you could simply delete that NK2 file (I usually renamed it to Personal Email.OLD” – a force of habit). Next, rename “Work Email.NK2” to “Personal Email.NK2”. When you log into your new profile all your auto-complete data was there.
This all changed in Outlook 2010. Outlook 2010 did away with the NK2 file completely and merged all the autocomplete data into the users Exchange Mailbox/PST file. This was great in part as many people often forgot to transfer that NK2 file when they moved to a new computer, or, the autocomplete data was lost in the event of a catastrophic failure, such as a failure of the local hard drive.
The challenge this created for me was that I had a user that owned two Exchange mailboxes which were configured under one profile. They wanted to change which mailbox was their primary/default mailbox. However, both mailboxes had completely separate autocomplete data attached to them and whichever was the default mailbox was the one that populated the autocomplete data in the current Outlook profile. (We were also making a new profile as they were also switching from On-Premise Exchange to Office365 at the same time.) So when I made the secondary mailbox the default/primary in the brand new profile the autocomplete data changed to a much older and undesirable copy.
What I found is that in some form autocomplete data does still exist in your local profile. On a Windows 7 box if you navigate to the RoamCache folder identified below:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\RoamCache
You may find one or more files called.
Stream_Autocomplete_<string of numbers and letters>.dat.
This is basically the new cache file for AutoComplete. The string of numbers is likely a SID of some form but where it is referenced (probably the registry) is beyond me.
To figure out which AutoComplete file belonged to which profile I modified the To cache by adding or removing an address. This changed the timestamp on the DAT file. That way I knew which DAT file belonged to which profile. From there I could copy and overwrite the new profile’s autocomplete cache file with the old one. And presto! All autocomplete data in the new profile was from the old profiles primary mailbox.
Hope this helps.
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Chris says
Helped solve an issue we were having with importing our company global on non exchange accounts. Thanks!
Steve Chrisman says
Thanks…quick and easy fix for a recurring issue after each computer update
Paul Slager says
This is all obvious stuff, I need to have end users do this and honestly this is way to cumbersome for them. Does anyone have a scripted way to do this, or can you import the autocomplete through a command like you could with the NK2 file.
Andres says
This is a great find…but the file keeps reverting to the previous version when I open Outlook. Any suggestions?
Andres says
Nevermind…I figured it out. I was coping the data in notepad from the old file to the new file. It would save, but when Outlook started, it would be reverted to the old data.
The fix was to just rename the old file to the new file and it worked like a charm.
Thanks for the article!
Gareth Gudger says
Glad to help!
James S says
Fantastic! I would only add that to get it working for me I had to wait for Outlook 2013 to create a new Stream_autocomplete file, delete it, and rename my old file in order to get it working
Paul says
Great find! I was just preparing to accept they had been lost in the update. Thanks!
Stephen says
Yeah brilliant.. thanks. I had to do it while Outlook was running otherwise when Outlook is started it would just blank the copied .dat file and replace it with the old one some how!!
Gareth Gudger says
Awesome. Hadn’t run into that, but glad you got it resolved!
Trevor says
thank you so much, I have been hunting for a month now, unsuccessfully, to find a solution. And then to have it explained so succinctly… Awesome.