Good Morning!

As a network admin, how many times have you fielded a call where the user claims to have lost all contacts only to find the real issue is a corrupt or missing names cache file in outlook?  For those who do not know, Outlook stores a cache of email addresses where you have sent messages so you can quickly add addresses to an email. This is the function that "auto-completes" the email address in the To: field.

In most cases this occurs when a machine is replaced and the names cache has not been moved to the users profile on the new PC, but in some cases the cache file is simply corrupt and can no longer be read by outlook. There are several tools on the market that will attempt to repair this cache file.  I have listed the most well known of these at the end of this post.

I recently came across another tool you may find usefull.  It will rebuild the names cache by parsing all email in your sent items to gather the addresses shown in the To: field into a new NK2 file.  This is especially usefull if you no longer have access to the users original NK2 file, or if one of the tools listed cannot recover itmes from the original file in case of corruption.  The tools provider site provides a great description at http://nk2.emenems.net/how_it_works.

Enjoy!

Ray

The following are more traditional repair tools for NK2 files:

http://www.nk2.info/
• NK2.info is a small utility to view and export the contents of an Outlook auto completion file.
• NK2.info can recover e-mail addresses and names from a corrupted NK2 file!
• NK2.info is free

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/outlook_nk2_autocomplete.html
This utility reads the AutoComplete file of Outlook (with .NK2 extension), displays all email records stored in it, and allows you to easily export these records into text/html/xml file.
It also has an experimental feature to import your outlook addressbook to the nk2 file

http://code.google.com/p/debunk2/
a tool that tries to get info from an existing .nk2 file and can export it to the following formats
• CSV/TSV - comma-, tab-, and semicolon-separated lists
• vCard - virtual business cards (vcf)
• SyncML - an xml dialect of vcard (planned)

http://www.ingressor.com/about_nk2_files.htm
A full-featured NK2 (auto-complete) file editor. Commercial software, pricing starts at $40 to $350