Outlook Solutions

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.