Contact groups are in address list but wont show up in address bar

[lozza_dearnley]

Hi, property manager here.

So I have alot of my tenants saved as their personal email addresses, and then nearly all of them are also saved under a contact group, which is the property address. So if I am writing an email to [John] at [Fake Street] I can start typing JOHN or FAKE, and get the contact or the contact group respectively. This works really well most of the time but it seems like Outlook can only 'remember' a certain amount of contact groups.

By which I mean, I can type JOH and get "John" as a recommended contact but typing FAK doesn't bring up the "Fake St" contact group. I have noticed that this seems to work better on the early alphabet saved names (A, B, C) and less so on the later ones (X, Y, Z). Basically it seems to trail off around the L-M section, and it appears to be getting shorter (a few days ago I could view a bunch of properties on "Lake St" but now only two of them appear.

EDIT - This appears to be a trend rather than a rule as I can still see a few that I have on "Tenth" ave.

The contact groups are still in the address book and if I press "to" I can manually look them up and email them but this wastes time manually searching for it. It doesn't appear to have an affect on contacts themselves, just the groups. Is there any way to fix this? I have about 120 contact groups and roughly 300 contacts, if that makes a difference. 

Thanks for your help!

[#2]

@lozza_dearnley , it might just be coincidental that some of the names you're typing are names that you've sent messages to before; thus entering them into your autocomplete (nk2) file.

[#3]

@lozza_dearnley Hi all so I figured it out, I think Outlook only remembers a certain number of email addresses and over time they have just accumulated so the ones I need are being forgotten.

Here's how I fixed it:

Go to File / Options / Mail / Send Messages

Click 'Empty Auto-complete list' and make sure it is ticked

This deletes all the autofills but the email addresses stay in your address book

Open a new email, press 'To', select all the addresses you want to autocomplete, and hit 'enter' 

This will add them all to the 'To' section and to Outlook's memory so when you start typing the persons name (or in my case, the address), they will pop up ready for selection.

Seems to be working so far, hopefully I am able to help someone else with this issue!