How to Exclude Address Lists from Outlook Autocomplete

Problem:

I received a rather unhappy email from a student today regarding an email on which that student was incorrectly copied. It turns out that this student's name is the same as the contact in my Outlook address book that I was trying to reach.

Further testing revealed that when I composed a new email, my Outlook address book was never even consulted for autocomplete, since Outlook would automatically select the student's address without my confirmation. Pressing Ctrl+Enter like I usually do to quickly send out emails would cause the student's email address to be automatically selected with no indication to me that the selection was actually incorrect.

So... what to do to prevent myself from getting into trouble later...

Solution:

Fortunately, I came across a Microsoft article that gave me a hint after I searched for "microsoft create a filtered global address list" on Google.

"HOW TO: Create a New Global Address List with a Custom Search by Using an LDAP Filter"
Microsoft Support
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823151

The article gave me hope, and I looked more into my address book settings where I found the answer.

So, without further ado, the steps to reconfigure the autocomplete settings are:

1. Open the Address Book.


2. Click Tools > Options.


3. Add, remove and reorder the lists used by the check names and autocomplete features.