When those contacts just disappear...

...from your Outlook or Outlook Express contact list, what does that mean?Before you start screaming at the PC and threatening it with a sledgehammer (a favourite trick of mine), here's a tip I found out the hard way when I suddenly lost visibility of all my contacts when trying to send an email a few years ago.

Your contact list will become invisible in Email mode if you have 1000 contacts or more. Most of us don't have that many on our contact list (although the Forum did!), and perhaps Microsoft has fixed it with the latest version. I use a Mac these days so can't comment accurately on that.

So what you have to do is delete some of your contacts, and once you're down to 999 or below they will all magically reappear. There are probably a heap of old contact emails you still have which no longer work, so why not do a regular purge of your email contacts and remove the ones which are outdated?