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Exporting contact list trickery with Outlook and Exchange

One of my goals when networking is to always walk away with contact information, preferably in the form of a business card.

Why, you ask? In this day of social networks, you’d be surprised how easily you can connect to others through a few degrees of separation.

Let me use LinkedIn as an example. I currently have about 480 connections on LinkedIn. Three degrees, though, I’m connect to almost 3 million people.

Although Facebook doesn’t have the same “friend of a friend” contact mechanism, it is easy enough to see who each person is connected to and do some manual footwork to establish a connection.

So as I was working through my contact list that I exported from Outlook (about 1000 contacts in all), I noticed several that several email addresses were listed like the following:

/o=ORGANIZATION_NAME/ou=first administrative group/cn=Recipients/cn=Tester2 EX Tester2 Tester2LastName (Tester2@corp.organization.com)

You might ask why I use Outlook when I run a Mac as my main work laptop? Well, I use Outlook in Parallels when it comes to things like contact management because it seems easier to deal with (at least in my mind) than Entourage, Microsoft’s email and calendar client that we use on the Mac side.

Well, that format above isn’t very helpful when you are trying to import the list into another program, such as Evite, for sending out invitations to a party.

After a bit of searching, I stumbled upon the solution from a site in Australia with a blog entry title of Outlook Change Email Address Type.

The problem is due to the fact that we use Microsoft Exchange Server for our email and calendar management, and any internal email address it stores in a format that is easier for the server to read. This also has to do with the way that I added the contact.

In order to fix this and save the actual email address and not the MS Exchange Server information as part of the contact, you have to modify the contact and trick it into thinking it is a stand alone contact and not connected to the mail server.

The hack to change Email Address Type is below. Is it a hassle to fix? Definitely, as I had about 100 contacts that I had to correct, but maintaining the contact information is an important component of maintaining an active social network. I recommend exporting your contacts as a CSV format (comma delimited) and uploading them to sites like LinkedIn at least once a quarter.

LinkedIn and others due have plugins for Outlook that allow you to sync your data much easier, but I prefer the old school method, because it also forces me to cleanup my contacts.

1. Select the contact’s details.
2. In the General tab, replace the existing the e-mail address with a string starting with smtp:. For example, replace a.b@mail.x.com with smtp:a.b@mail.x.com. Note: you have to type in the new dummy address; if you use a suggestion from Outlook, the address type does not change.
3. Select the Properties context menu item of the dummy e-mail address. Outlook should display the E-mail Properties dialog. Note that the E-mail type: field now has a value of SMTP.
4. In this dialog, remove the smtp: prefix from the e-mail address.
5. Press the OK button and the dialog should close.
6. Initially, the Contact’s e-mail address does not seem to have changed. If you click on the Display As: field, Outlook corrects the e-mail address.
7. Delete the string in the Display As: field and press Enter. Outlook should refresh the Display As: field.
8. Save the updated contact.

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn, Outlook, Exchange, contact, export, email