Thanks for helping with that, you have no idea how long I took to figure this out and I have been a technician for 4 years.
I thought I would contribute my notes to this forum and hope it helps.
what worked for me.
1. I used a tool called spambully to extract all the addreses in the sent items folder. this added the emails to the white list which was exportable.
2. clear the auto complete list. your "auto_stream" file should be gone.
3. restart outlook
4. add the emaill addresses to a new email, set the delivery delay to a future date and send.
5. wait until you have seen the "Auto_Stream" rebuilt before restarting outlook.
There seems to be a limit on how much data "auto_complete" can store. 1000-1100 or so. thats why I used the Spambully tool to only get the most recently sent email addresses.
Microsoft doesnt really have a solution for this other than empty the auto fill and re-add email addresses. They did us a tool MFC??? something or another. but that did help much.
I was asked to try this by MS Support.....
• File |Options | Mail |uncheck “Automatic name checking” and
“Use Auto-Complete List to suggest names when typing in the To, Cē and Bcc lines “and hit the “Empty Auto-Complete List button and restart outlook
• Again go to File |Options | Mail |checked “Automatic name checking” and
“Use Auto-Complete List to suggest names when typing in the To, Cē and Bcc lines “and restarted outlook
Repeated the same procedure 2 more times in the same sequence
Then go to the Address book select all the Email
Send the email to all those address using delay delivery and rebuilt the Autocomplete
Other notes to micosoft support................
If you empty the auto complete, the steam file will disappear. When you add email addresses back in, you must leave outlook open so the file can rebuild. If you close outlook before this is rebuilt and visible the file will never create.
I cannot determine the actual number of email addresses that auto complete can store but there is a limit. I can add 1057, wait for the file to rebuild, then add another 1000, it will only store a portion (maybe 900) of the newly added email addresses and it will delete/overwrite (maybe 251) from the previous loading.
The file size (auto stream) seems to be anywhere from 1052k and 1083k. I cannot find a relationship between file size, email address length and total number of addresses.
I hope this helps. There really should be a tool to rebuild this function. There are many, many users whom rely on the auto complete functionality.
@artsilva - thank you so much. This worked for me
If you have your old "stream_autocomplete.xxx.dat" file from a backup or working system, you can use this file to migrate onto a new system.
I got a new computer and had the old files in the RaomCache directory as mentioned above. I installed Win7 x64 with Office 2010 on the new system. I exported the email, calandar, contacts, etc. via .pst file on the old system and imported this file on the new system. Now everything is up and running but without any autocomplete entries.
I sent one email and shut down Outlook. This creates the "stream_autocomplete.xxx.dat" file in the RoamCache directory.
1. Now, rename this newly created file in the new computer by replacing "dat" to "old".
2. Copy into this RoamCache directory your 'stream_autocomplete..." file from your backup copy or old computer.
3. Copy the hex digits in the file you just named "old" and paste these digits into the backup file with the extension ".dat". make sure to keep the same naming format.
4. Open Outlook and now you have your autocomplete function with your previous contacts.
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