where have all my contacts from hotmail gone

Anonymous
2013-03-31T21:26:38+00:00

WHERE HAVE ALL MY HOTMAIL CONTACTS GONE?

Outlook | Web | Outlook.com | Contacts

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous
2013-03-31T21:29:35+00:00

In Outlook.com contacts ARE people...To access People from Outlook.com, hover the cursor over the Outlook logo in the top left and click on the down-arrow that appears to the right of the Outlook logo.

Select People. 

Returning to your Inbox from People:

Hover the cursor over the People logo and click on the down-arrow that appears on the right of the People logo. Select Mail.  

You can also get to Calendar or Skydrive in the same manner.

Filtering your list:

Above the search box at the top of the Contact list on the left, is a filter option which says "All ". 

If you click on this you should see the groups you created in the past.  

Click on any of these to filter your list to just the contacts in that group.

Selecting one or many Contacts:

If you click on a contact name in the list, the details for that contact will appear on the right.  

Alternatively, if you click on the check box to the left of the contact picture, you can build up a list of selected contacts on the right by clicking on the check box to the left of multiple contacts.

Adding/Removing from Group membership:

Whether you select one or many contacts, you will see a top menu bar option for Groups.  

If you click on this, then it will display the list of groups with a check box checked for each group that the contact(s) is/are a member of. 

You can uncheck to remove or check to add, the selection of contact(s) to the chosen groups, and then click on Apply to apply the changes.  

Your selected contacts will then be updated to be added or removed from the groups you chose as appropriate.

Delete

When you select one or many contacts, you will see a top menu bar option for Delete.  

If you click on Delete and click Delete in the confirmation box, the selected contacts will be deleted.

Edit:

You can choose edit if you have clicked on a single contact (name or picture) in the list on the left to see their details on the right.  

When viewing their details, click on Edit in the top menu bar to edit or add details.

Browsers:

We recommend that you keep your web browser up to date to get the most out of the People experience.

If you’re not using an updated browser, some parts of People might not work and it might not display properly.

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-11-08T23:31:52+00:00

    I have just lost all my contacts listed for my email.  What happened?  How do I recover all of them?  Thank you!

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-11-08T23:35:56+00:00

    I access my account by signing on with my hotmail address and password.  When I clicked on People icon, none of my contacts were listed.  The only thing I saw was a blue dot revolving circle next to the word Contacts.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-11-09T03:40:10+00:00

    Here is what I did to fix the issue - may or may not be the same for your situation:

       1.   I logged in to my email account on the web at www.Outlook.com (not the same as on logging into the  laptop itself).  If you are already logged in to this message board and open a new tab with address www.outlook.com, it should log you into your online inbox automatically).

       2. Once in your online email account, click the People icon at lower left of window. I could see then, that all my contacts are still there. So they were only missing from my local machine - relief!

       3. Just for safety, I downloaded a backup of the contacts. If you are in the online People page, you can do that by selecting "Manage" at top center of page, and then Export from the dropdown menu. But this step is unrelated to getting contacts back into the PC.

       4. Next. I closed all windows, etc., then went to my Mail App settings (in local PC machine - NOT online) and deleted all email accounts.

       5. Reboot the machine, and then re-add all email accounts in the Mail app from scratch. The reinstall will automatically sync your contact list from your Outlook online account. 

       6. Whole thing doesn't take long to do - but jeez - Microsoft is really supposed to be beyond having this sort of thing happening by now! Corruption of the Contacts list is a pretty serious thing. Would it be so hard to have a "Please re-Sync my Contacts from Outlook.com" option (that actually works) somewhere in the Mail app????

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-11-09T10:05:30+00:00

    In my hotmail account suddenly all my contacts have gone. The list is empty. Also although I can move/delete emails I cannot open them. If I manually enter an email address it still won't send. I have tried restarting the computer but to no effect. This has been going on for nearly 18 hours now. Any help greatfully received.

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