Mike's Tech Blog

Recently I had accidently set up an Outlook email account with the wrong Reply To email address. As a result, when someone would reply to them, the email would bounce. This situation continued even though I had corrected the email account.

The problem was that everyone who replied to the email had the incorrect email address in their AutoComplete cache.

So what exactly is the autocomplete cache? Well when you type in something like say, someone's email address and a small window opens up (like in the image above) just below where you are typing that has a list of suggested email addresses. That is coming from the autocomplete cache.

There are two ways to delete what is in this cache. First the easy way. As in my case, since an incorrect email address was stored in the autocomplete cache, all I had to do was to start typing the email address I wanted to type, then use the down arrow on the keyboard to highlight the offending email address, and then just hit the Delete key. Pretty simple huh? Using this method allows you to selectively delete which ever item in the autocomplete cache you want.

The second way to delete the autocomplete cache, is to delete the file that this data is saved in. to do this, just look for the N2K file in your profile, which is located in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.

Something else to be aware of is if you use someone else's computer to do an online purchase, and you type in your charge card information, it too can be saved in the autocomplete cache! So now the original owner of the computer you used can just try to do any online purchase, and they can see your account number!

So needless to say, its a good idea to clear this information out of the autocomplete cache, not only from other's computers, but your own as well!