MS Outlook as we know is a powerful email client that provides a variety of email-based functionalities to its users. The one we will talk about, here, is the personal book of contacts provided by MS Outlook. Outlook Contact Manager allows you to store names, addresses, contact numbers, and other valuable information associated with a particular person. If you use Outlook as the default client, you can have a dozens of contacts stored on your contact manager; moreover, Outlook stores recent contact details in the cache memory so that you can easily autocomplete the data in the email field by just typing the initial letters of an email id. Now, what happens here is – over a period of time both the number of contacts in the contacts manager and the cache memory grows rapidly affecting the overall size of mailbox and resulting in overloading of data. For that matter, deleting your unused contacts and clearing Outlook’s cache is a compulsory step to optimize the size of your mailbox and prevent unnecessary data overloading.

But, what are the steps that one needs to follow in order to remove unused contacts from Outlook. Well, removing contacts from Outlook is quite a simple task. You can remove or delete contacts by using functionalities already in the Outlook program. The procedure, however, is carried out manually by selecting the contacts and using the delete functionality. We will elaborate the step-wise procedure to delete contacts from Outlook Contact Manager and Outlook Cache as well.

Read Also : Fix the Error “You Cannot Delete This Outlook Data File”

How to clear Outlook contacts?

Manual approach to delete contacts from Outlook involves just a few steps. In case you want to clear the entire contact list and start a new one, all you have do is – Select all contacts (Ctrl+A) and click the Delete button. However, to delete only specific contacts from the contact list, follow the given instructions:

Note: these instructions are based on Outlook 10 and later versions.

Step 1: Launch Outlook and click on the People icon at the bottom.

Launch Outlook

Step 2: Select the contacts that are intended to be deleted and click on the Delete button from the menu bar.

Select the contacts

Clearing Contacts from the Cache Memory

Outlook comes with an Autocomplete List feature that keeps a record of every email id you have ever contacted, whether recently or at a previous point in time. All these data are accumulated in the cache of your Outlook application.

Now, in order to clear contacts from the cache memory, you can opt for two different methods for two different scenarios. Suppose you want to remove only some specific email addresses, then you have to do it manually by deleting the suggestions from the Autocomplete Kist. And, if you want to clear the whole cache data, you just have to clear the Autocomplete List.

Clearing individual contacts from Autocomplete List:

  1. Launch Outlook, and compose a new email.
  2. In the destination address (To) text box, type the initial letters of the email id you want to remove. As you type the letters, the autocomplete list will throw suggestions as available matches. Scroll down to select the contact that is intended to be removed and click on the ‘X’ (Delete) button adjacent to the suggestion.
    3. Clearing individual contacts

Clearing the entire Autocomplete List:

  1. Launch Outlook and navigate through File >> Options.
  2. In the Outlook Options window, select the Mail tab and click on the Empty Auto-complete List button from the Send messages section.
    3. Empty Auto-complete List
  3. Confirm clearing the entire Autocomplete List, click the Yes button.
    4. Confirm clearing
  4. You can also disable the Auto-complete List feature if you don’t want your Outlook program to store any key-events or suggestions in the future. Just uncheck the Use Auto-complete List to suggest names when typing in the To, Cc, and Bcc lines checkbox.
    5. disable the Auto-complete List feature

All addresses from the Autocomplete List and the cache memory are cleared by now.

There are some rare cases where the user is unable to delete contacts from the suggestion list while composing emails. This happens because of unexpected errors like corruption or damages to the PST. If your Outlook PST goes corrupt for any reason, it’s almost impossible to access or delete contacts from your Outlook contact manager. The best way to get out of such situations is to take help from automated third-party PST recovery software like Outlook PST Recovery.

Outlook PST Recovery is developed to repair corrupted PST files. It recovers contacts from Outlook PST files without harming the integrity of data. There is no file size restriction with this amazing software. Moreover, you can save the recovered file in different formats like PST, MBOX, Office 365, and Exchange Server. With the trial version, you can repair 25 items from each PST folder free-of-cost.

Wrapping Up

This article gives information on how to clear contacts from Outlook’s contact manager and the Autocomplete List. Deleting contacts from Outlook is quite easy as you went through the steps mentioned in this write-up. For users who are unable to access or delete contacts from Outlook contact manager, the chances are that your PST has gone corrupt. For such situations, you can use Outlook PST Recovery.

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