How to disable Suggested Contacts in Outlook 2010
January 28th, 2010 by Black
Yesterday I installed Office 2010 beta on my laptop and started using Outlook right away. Some new features caught my attention:
- the way to install it through Click-to-Run streaming technology, that is you just download 2 MB and start using it right away, the programs will get downloaded in background but you’re able to use most of the interface functionality
- the “quick steps” section in Outlook where various multi-step actions can be added and customized (like moving the email to a specified folder)
- a better way to organize conversations (Seamonkey has it for years now)
But when I tried to make a phone call on my iPhone, I noticed a lot of strange contacts (like hundreds of them) that I didn’t had before in my address book (I sync my phone Contacts list with the office Exchange server). All of them organized in a folder Suggested Contacts. I linked this event with the Office installation and there it was: a nice folder with various contacts Outlook extracted from all my emails. But since I don’t receive one or two emails per day, but thousands, I just needed to disable the collection or at least the syncronization of this folder with the iPhone. I don’t know a way not to sync a certain address book folder, but I found out how to disable collecting such data:
Access the File tab and then the Options on the left …
… then the Contacts group and uncheck the “Automatically create Outlook contacts for recipients that do not belong to an Outlook Address Book”. After that, just delete all the harvested contacts in the Suggested Contacts folder and your iPhone will automatically update with just the contacts you’ve added.
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Great stuff! Though this automatic contact feature can be very useful to some users obviously the shear volume of emails you get make it a hindrance. Thanks for sharing this tip!
Cheers,
Andy
MSFT Office Outreach
Thanks for the post — been busting my head over this!
Well, here’s my issue. I want to keep using the ’suggested contacts’ feature in outlook, but I don’t want to sync them to my iPhone. If you delete all of the ’suggested contacts’, then you remove the ability to have these email addresses popup when you are typing a new email for instance. Although I don’t want them as ‘full contacts’, I do want them to popup. But NOT on my iPhone. Any ideas on how to Not Sync Suggested Contacts?
Did you ever figure out how to delete the “Suggested Contacts “folders once they were created?
Thanks so much–it was quite a shock to see 1000 contacts on my iPhone. Chris–I changed my suggested contacts to a List view, and then just Shift clicked to select all of them, right clicked and deleted.
Thanks for the fix.
This has been causing all sorts of trouble around here since we upgraded.
THANKS a bunch! Now my iPhone is no longer bloated with contacts.
[...] I just installed Outlook 2010 and saw my contact list double in size on my IPhone soon after. Took me a while to see that it added a “Suggested List” to the iphone where all these extra contacts were coming from. I found a blog post that shows how to remove the suggested list completely from outlook 2010, thus fixing the problem on the Iphone here: http://www.blackonstuff.com/2010-01-28/how-to-disable-suggested-contacts-in-outlook-2010/ [...]