Manually Update Your Cached Global Address List – Outlook 2003

Alrighty then, so here is the scenario for you: Your PC resides in a network environment, you use Outlook, your local mail server – Exchange. Beautiful! Now Outlook has two major options while working with an Exchange Server, you either cache your mail and contacts locally (Mainly used for Laptop users) or you don’t cache it locally. If not cached locally, the mail server keeps a file which contains all this data. When cached, a copy is stored on the PC itself. This allows the user to access mail and contacts while not connected to the Exchange Server. Local caching, however means that you need to update your Global Address Lists. This is how to do just that!

First things first, lets determine if your Outlook is caching or not.

In Outlook, select the ‘Tools’ menu and click on ‘E-Mail Accounts’.

On the E-Mail Accounts Wizzard dialogue that appears, select ‘Next’. You would now be at the E-mail Accounts dialogue, as seen below. From here select ‘Change’.

After clicking ‘Change’, the Exchange Settings dialogue appears, from here you will see a greyed out text box (Containing Server name), a checkbox to toggle Caching on and off and finally another greyed out text box containing your user name. If the checkbox is ticked, you are running in a cached mode. If it is blank you are reading directly from Mr. Exchange himself. From here, ‘Cancel’ out and select ‘Finish’ on the E-Mail Accounts settings screen.

Of course, the following steps only apply to update a cached system. So if you are not cached, don’t bother following steps. It would be a useless effort.

Outlook will always download a copy of the Global Address List, however, it is only updated every 24 hours. To force the update, do as follows:

Click the ‘Tools’ menu, navigate to ‘Send/Receive’ and finally to ‘Download Address Book’.

In the dialogue that appears, uncheck ‘Download changes since last send/receive’, make sure that ‘Full Details’ is selected and then select ‘Global Address List’ as the Address Book. Click OK.

That’s it! See, it isn’t that complicated. After clicking OK, you will see a Send/Receive box appear, this updates your local data and then disappears once more. Presto! Welcome to the updated version of the GAL.