Tip: Contact folder (Outlook 2000 SP1)

Topic

New Reply

I had been experiencing a strange problem where I would send an email to someone but if something went wrong (too big for example), the kick-back would show an OLD email address that I had changed long ago. I opened the email, clicked on properties for the address and it showed the correct address. I checked the contact folder and it had the correct folder. But the kick-back showed the old out-of-date email address?????

I have everything set to use Outlook contacts as my sole address book and have even gone so far as to delete the .wab files since I don’t use the Windows Address Book, and in the past I found that this was one source of duplicate, out-of-synch email addresses.

When the problem happened again a few weeks ago I decided to spend some time trying to get to the bottom of the problem. The person’s old email address that showed in the kick-back email was not in the contact folder and there were no .wab files. However, after a file body search though my hard drives, I did find the old address in a file that had a .NICK extension. I have no idea what this is or why it existed, but I deleted it and the problem hasn’t reocurred.

And none of this makes any sense as to how an email address can look correct outgoing but be changed to something else when it comes back rejected, never having been received by the person!

If anyone does know what this .NICK file is and how it is used in Outlook, I’d be curious….

Reply | Quote

Replies

Perhaps this article will help:

http://support.microsoft.com/directory/art…b;en-us;Q242074%5B/url%5D

Reply | Quote

Yes, it did help. Thanks! I should have checked the kb before I posted. Of course, I would only have known WHAT to check AFTER I figured out what the problem and cause was. There is nothing about “nicknames” in the O2k Outlook help file.

Here is another article from MS on this:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…b;en-us;Q245421%5B/url%5D

Personally, I’m not clear on what the value or need of this file is, particularly when it isn’t really documented and needs a seperate utility to control it. Why not just use the darn contact list instead of adding another level of indirection?????

Reply | Quote

I’ll be sure to tell the programmers next time:

Reply | Quote

I personally would be miserable if I had to type out complete addresses or use dialogs every time I wanted to address a message. But I also haven’t run into that bug (so far), so I only see the upside.

Reply | Quote

Agreed. But you do have to clean out this .NICK file occasionally of dead addresses to avoid problems.

Reply | Quote

yes, and the easiest way is to delete the file. (In OL2002 it’s renamed *.NK2)

Reply | Quote