"An Outlook Address Book entry cannot be used as an e-mail address in a contact."
Um, yeah. It’s almost impossible to figure out what this means. I was trying to move an email address in an existing contact in Outlook 2010 from the E-mail slot to the E-mail 2 slot and this gem popped up when I tried to paste it.
Turning to Bing, nothing of any use.Google, much the same. However, I found questions on this at least back to 2004 with Outlook 2003. So what’s going on?
Well, I have no idea, really, but here’s the fix that worked for me. First, I copied the existing email address from the E-mail slot into the Notes field for safekeeping. Then I updated the E-mail slot with the new email address I wanted to add and saved the contact. Next I opened the contact up again, copied the old email address out of the Notes field and pasted it into the E-mail 2 slot. This time I was allowed to past the old email address in.
I tried all sorts of variations on this, and what I described above was the only one that worked, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some smarter way around it. Frankly, I’m not sure why it works, but it does.
Another one for the “I just wasted a bunch of time so you don’t have to” bucket.
Thanks! Gotta love those Microsoft “Helpful” Dialog boxes (Not!). Deleting the record in “Suggested Contacts” worked for me :-)
Thank you for your helpful hints! Annoying problem solved!
Hi all, I’ve deleted the name from the suggested contacts folder but it doesn’t solve the issue. I haven’t had this issue with any other contact record but it will not let me proceed. Any further thoughts on this issue?
The correct answer/solution can be found at
http://www.davidgiard.com/2012/12/18/ErrorAnOutlookAddressBookEntryCannotBeUsedAsAnEmailAddressInAContact.aspx
Thanks so much Marc. Have been going crazy with this for months. Hope you keep this up for a long time so others can be helped.
This is very strange. I went to Personal Folders Contacts NOT the Outlook Data contacts and then copied and pasted the name and email address into notes as per your article and deleted from email 1 completely. Then saved and closed. Then I went to address book and listing was there. I went back to contacts and email spaces were still empty.
Have been trying for months to use an external drive to get my address book contacts back into Outlook 2010 on new pc. Did not know how to use pst files or even find them on external drive but your way worked- so a million thanks to you for something I’ve been trying to figure out for months.!
This is just pure laziness on MS to have something so annoying continue to pop up after so long without them actually solving it.
where do you see the list of suggested contacts?