Some Outlook Auto-complete Information

Friday, 8. June 2012

It has been quite some time since my last post so I thought I would share a small experience today from an email migration and some information I learned. I will note that this information is already readily available so nothing new here.
Well I’m sure most people have had people get cranky if they ever switched to a new outlook profile. One of the big bummers in the office was not being able to see their Auto-complete list stored in their n2k file.
I of course had to disagree well knowing that Microsoft loves to be caching information. So with a little bit of help from Google I quickly found the DIR in which Outlook caches dat files C:\Users\”Username”\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook
There is also this niffy little tool that if you pay for it in a corporate environment would allow you to edit the AutoComplete list that is stored in a .dat file inside C:\Users\”Username”\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\RoamCache
NK2Edit allows you to view the file with a ton of options. The N2K viewer is fully free but in order to use the editor will cost you a few coins. (Great price for big company’s look for a quick fix to an annoying co-worker due to lost auto-complete goodness)
The default file that was picked up by NK2Edit was C:\Users\wroersma\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\RoamCache\ Stream_Autocomplete_0_9F18B280B91C584490C33E11FC630E5A.dat
Now if you download the program you will notice that these files are caching quite a bit of information to aid the user in the search of a recent contact they have been in touch with.
The viewer shows that information such as the Index number, Address type, Display Name, Exchange Email String, Drop down name, Search String, Domain, SMTP address, Record Weight, Sending format and if there is duplicates.

This is a lot of information that I found stored in plain text when I viewed it in a hex editor.

So if you can rename files you could easily use this for your own purposes. One thing I will note in my search was that these files and back log for over a year in the past with a profile that isn’t even there anymore.

Some other files of interest in the same location

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.