Windows 10 Contacts with generic IMAP mailbox

mgrant · 31 Aug 2019

I have a gmail acct and an acct on a server with dovecot on linux. I am using the Windows 10 mail (the app that comes with W10, NOT Outlook). I have added both accounts as IMAP accounts.

In Windows Mail, I have many fewer contacts than if I go to the gmail contacts web page. And for my imap mailbox, it seems like none of those contacts appear (no one who sent me mail on that server ended up in my contacts list).

I realize that IMAP is a mail protocol, but could someone please explain to me where these contacts come from and what I need to do to "import" them from old messages, especially things I replied to?

IMAP is a mail user agent access protocol. As far as I'm aware, contacts are not part of this protocol. So then what is the correct way to have a contact list on a server when your mail is stored in an IMAP mailbox?

Infrasonic · 31 Aug 2019

Mail has three components with their own settings, email, calendar, contacts (which it calls 'people').

Go into people/settings and select the bits you want, paying particular attention to the 'filter contacts list' bit where the email accounts and associated contacts is decided.

Personally I like to keep all my email addresses separate with their own contacts lists, but you can merge them all into one list if you want.
Watch out for other clients like Outlook (nee Accompli) on Android as they have a tendency to merge contacts unless you prevent it. I've had to undo that in the past by purging, and re-syncing...

mgrant · 01 Sep 2019

I have done this and the appropriate boxes are indeed checked. I absolutely don't see all my contacts that I see in gmail and as far as I can tell, none that I see that came from the dovecot server.

Furthermore, under contacts, I only see my gmail accounts. My dovecot (imap) acct isn't listed there. But in the mail settings, it is definitely there as one of the mail accounts.

I know that IMAP doesn't do anything with contacts settings. It's not clear to me what's different from my gmail imap connection and my dovecot imap connection that it would list those under contacts.

I was expecting, hoping anyway, was that Windows10 Mail would scrape contacts from my mail as it came in and went out. I kind of expected that if I emailed someone, that the second time I emailed them that Windows 10 Mail would autocomplete and know the address, but it doesn't seem to. I have to go in and copy and paste the address from an old message each time. Very annoying!

Infrasonic · 02 Sep 2019

Check the settings/ account management/ change mailbox sync settings and make sure you have 'any time' selected which should download all your email rather than the last 7 days/3 months et al.

If that is already selected then another option might be to set up a webmail Outlook.com address, IMAP your Gmail and Dovecot email over to it, set it up in Mail, sync it, and then see if it starts populating 'to' with known addresses on new emails.
I get what you want in my setup (even with my domain address), if I type a letter in to the 'to' box of a new email it populates with a load of potential addresses.
My setup is more complicated though, so It's possible there's a been bit of cross pollination of addresses going on via the various accounts/aliases.
(I have IMAP/POP3 back ups going on at the webmail level between various Outlook.com and Gmail accounts for ecosystem redundancy in case of cloud outages.)