Windows 10: How Do You Show Contacts in 'To' Field of Windows 10 Mail App

I thought I'd install Windows 10 Threshold 2 (not to make the same mistake twice, on a laptop I hardly use this time) to see if the built-in Microsoft apps are now any better than they were in July. Disappointingly, with the exception of being able to turn off 'Conversation View', the Mail app is just as diabolically poor as it was back then. But on top of that, another thing I noticed this time is that when you type a name into the 'To:' field, it doesn't even look up that name / email address from your 'People' app contacts. The auto-complete feature only populates for people you've previously emailed.

So basically, if you haven't emailed someone, it won't show their name despite their details and email address being listed in the 'People' app.

Of course, another problem with not populating the auto-complete addresses from your address book is that if a contact changes their email address and you update their details in the 'People' app, the Mail app will still use the old email address in the autocomplete dropdown, causing you to keep emailing the wrong address.

Did Microsoft seriously release a Mail app that can't even look up names in your contacts list?

:)

 

Windows 10 Mail not showing contacts in 'TO' field

Sir / Madam,

In Windows 10 Mail app, email addresses in my contacts are not showing in the 'TO' field. How to fix it?

 

Contacts in People app not showing up in Windows 10 Mail app

I am putting in contacts into the People App which is synced to my outlook.com account. However they do not appear in the windows 10 mail app. For example when I start typing in the "To:" field, it shows no matches.

I have confirmed that the contacts are syncing fine with outlook. For example, when I go to outlook.com it all works fine..the contacts that I entered on my PC have synced and when I start typing in the "TO:" field on outlook.com they appear straight away.

It is just windows 10 mail that isn't working.

We have just upgraded from windows 7.

 

Sounds like you have come across one of the Email app bugs that only affects certain people

I have just tried on mine and it picks up details from the people app fine

 

I just added a new contact, a Mr 'Xten Forums', and doesn't work for me. Here's what I see, nothing in the drop-down list for this contact:

 

It does seem to have a fair share of issues this app, I have problems with it but not this
Have you tried the powershell to uninstall and then reinstall, probably make no difference but it cant hurt things

snippet out of people app




creating an email

 

Maybe it doesn't work because I have Cortana switched off. I'll have to try uninstalling and re-installing the app later.

 

have a look in Setting, Privacy, Contacts

Make sure Email is allowed access to the contact data

 

Yeah, I went through them and they are all set to allowed. That was my first thought too.

 

Thanks for your help Paul. After seeing that it was working correctly for you in your screenshots, it spurred me to play about with mine some more and the issue has resolved itself now.

I'm not sure what the cause was exactly, the only thing I can think of is that it needed more time to fully populate. Whenever I opened the Mail app, I noticed the CPU increased and 'Unistack Service Group' was doing something in the background. One of the items listed under that service was 'Contact Data', so maybe that was part of it. It's been running at about 20% CPU for a while now, so I'm not sure what it's crunching exactly, maybe some sort of indexing at a guess. Cheers.

 

Good to hear you have got it sorted out

It's possible it might still have been indexing (think it pauses this if using the machine)

One of those mysteries that we will probably never get to the bottom of