Clearing Outlook 2011/2016 Address & Directory Cache

[danshaw]

We are doing some cleanup with our Distribution Lists which are stored in AD. We use Exchange for our mail. I am wondering how to clear the directory cache if there is any so that any old cached distribution lists will no longer show up.

Does anyone know if there is a cache like this and if so where those cache file would be?

I have a majority of users on Outlook 2016 and some still on Outlook 2011.

[Eigger]

Try this solution on the exchange server itself if you want to hide addresses of disabled users from GAL.
http://serverfault.com/questions/367694/how-to-automatically-remove-disabled-ad-users-from-gal-in-exchange-2010
https://www.petri.com/forums/forum/windows-scripting/powershell/25780-disable-or-enable-user-account-via-powershell-script?postcount=4

Try this if you are talking about just the Auto Complete.
Clearing out the entire auto-complete list.
Important: You are deleting your data. Once it has been deleted, you will not be able to recover it. Make sure Outlook 2011 is closed. Open up "Finder" and navigate to /Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/Main Identity/Data Records/Recent Addresses/0T/0B/0M/0K/. *Note: Each "/" in the path above represents a break between screens. In this folder, there will be a file named, or similarly named to, x19_4.olk14Recent, delete this item. Open Outlook. You will receive an error indicating a problem with the Office database. Click Rebuild. After the rebuild is complete, hit the Done button and close the "Microsoft Database Utility" window.

https://kb.wisc.edu/office365/page.php?id=48716#mac

[danshaw]

Thanks for the reply @Eigger. The auto complete did the trick. This page also helped immensely. I just used a quick script to target the Office Identity folder and ran a recursive find along with a deletion of the database file. Restart outlook and its gone.

This is an example for the Office 2016 Outlook.

cd ~/Library/Group Containers/
find . -name "*.olk15RecentAddresses" -type f|xargs rm -f

[ooshnoo]

@danshaw Hey man.. using that script yields no results for me. It doesn't delete any file. Do you have an updated script you use aside from what you posted above?

[danshaw]

@ooshnoo I just re-ran the script and it still works fine for me. Open up terminal and type in each line to test. I didn't want to delete mine so I typed in the line below and it returned the location of that recent addresses file. The "rm -f" just deletes it.

find . -name "*.olk15RecentAddresses" -type f|xargs

Returns:

./UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile/Data/Recent Addresses/253/FDFB163B-4AD8-4993-8E35-0C2D781C238C.olk15RecentAddresses