Outlook 2010 tutorial: Find an email address you’ve accidently deleted

Like earlier versions, Outlook 2010 has an auto-complete feature that suggests names and email addresses as you start to type letters into the “To”, “CC” or “BCC” field. To select a name, you simply highlight the appropriate entry in the list and click.

It’s an extremely handy feature that makes entering addresses a much speedier process than it otherwise would be. While auto-complete in Outlook 2010 appears to be almost exactly the same as in previous versions, there is one important difference – and that’s how you delete unwanted items. Why would you want to delete? Well, if ever you mistype an address, you don’t want it to keep on appearing in your auto-complete list in case you inadvertently select it.

In previous versions of Outlook, to delete an item you had to use the Up and Down arrow keys to highlight the unwanted entry and then hit Delete on your keyboard. You can still do it that way in Outlook 2010, but there’s also an even simpler way. All you need to do is to click the little X that appears in the dropdown list. Easy, eh? But unfortunately, it can be too easy. It’s extremely easy to unintentionally hit that little X when selecting an address to insert. And it can be really frustrating. In most cases, you’ll be able to track the address down via your Contacts list or previous emails – but there may be times when you’ve deleted previously sent emails and never entered the contact into your address book. Grrr!

I don’t have a solution for the problem (you simply need to learn to click carefully!), but I do have a workaround that may help you find an address you’ve accidentally deleted. Outlook 2010 has a feature known as Suggested Contacts that maintains a record of everybody you’ve ever emailed. To access Suggested Contacts, simply click Contacts in the lower left corner of the Navigation Pane and then click Suggested Contacts located in the top left of the window.

Once there, you can search using the person’s first or last name or company – whatever you can remember – or simply scroll through the hundreds of email addresses until you find what you’re looking for.