Forum Discussion
After all these years, why is Outlook's "contacts" so BAD
Click on "New email"
Click in the "To" box, adn start typing ....
Outlook (sometimes) provides a drop-down of contacts that it thinks you're trying for...
It's this. This list is less than useless. And has been for years. And years. In fact, it's never been any good or use. It just puts up random names/addresses that may r may not have any similarity to what you've typed.
It's hard to fathom why Microsoft has let this "feature" remain so bad and useless for so long. Surely you can do better than this?
5 Replies
I have it via a corporate Office 365 account, having downloaded and installed the desktop Outlook client via that - my email account with that is an Exchange one. They also allow me to have a private (POP3) account using it s well. It is the classic Outlook for Microsoft 365.
Whether usiong my POP3 acount or my corporate one, when I am composing a new email adnw ant to enter teh 'To' recipient, I start typing in the box and Outlook offers me a dropdown of recipients it thinks I might be going for... they are invariably irrelevant. God alone know how Outlook is choosing them, 'cos I certianly don't.
I've used OUtlook for years, with a private desktop client before getting this corporate one. I had the same problem then. I've never found this "feature" any good.
Apologies for late reply - I thought I'd be notified if anyone replied to me, but I didn;t get any... I will check more often. (edit: ah, I see - I didn't click 'Follow')
Thanks, Phil
For Exchange Online accounts, the suggestions are based on your internal relationships with your colleagues.
Signals are for instance what's been filled out in the "Reports To" field for your user and who else has the same value. This basically builds the Org Explorer.
Other signals are who you are in the same Microsoft Teams with and who you've recently communicated with in either Outlook or Microsoft Teams.
From my experience, the suggestions have become pretty good over the years when it comes to people I'm regularly in contact with or who are "close" to me within the organization. Obviously, when I want to contact a "random" person within the company, I need to type quite a bit of their name before it comes as a suggestion.
For POP3, these signals don't exist and it usually first comes up with people you've (recently) emailed before.
For completeness' sake, could you post your exact Channel, Version and Build number as reported in;
File-> Office AccountI guess when I'm in the corporate account, and it;s a big corportion, it's no surprise I've never heard of most of the names it pops up - but really I'd rather not see them, and just see names I've had contact with.
Another thing is, it's so inconsistent. With the same prompt (first few letters typed) I get a different set of choices every time. And something else, for eg: there is one, and only one, address that begins with the letter u that I email on occassion. That never - ever - shows up. I always have to type the whole thing, ignoring the irrelevant options I am presented with.
Could you give some examples and context of your issues with the Contact Suggestion feature?
Are you in a corporate environment with Exchange or Exchange Online, or are you using it with an Outlook.com IMAP or POP3 account in a personal environment?
Also, are you using New Outlook or Classic Outlook?
