How to Recover Deleted Contacts on Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail is one of the most widely used email applications. It’s often the best choice for most home and basic Windows users because it’s free and comes with the Essentials application suite provided by Microsoft. However, the official support for it ended on January 10, 2017—four days after this post was created. Despite this, many people continue to use it on their Windows 10 systems. Given that this application has been running for years, I can imagine, like any software, it could become corrupt for various reasons. Consequently, a user may end up with no contacts, or all contacts might go missing. Fortunately, Live Mail stores data locally in the AppData folder in an *.edb file. This file contains all your contacts, and it can be used to restore them.

Some users also suggested using ESEDBViewer, which I did not find helpful.

This post will only cover restoring contacts. If you’ve lost any folders from a POP account, then you should read the Live Mail Folder Recovery Guide.

How to Recover Deleted or Lost Windows Live Mail Contacts.

1. To begin the process, ensure that Live Mail is closed, then click (here) to download the Live Contacts View application. After downloading, extract the file to a location you can remember. This will facilitate the easy retrieval of the file in the steps that follow when it’s needed.
2. The next step is to locate the *.edb files from your AppData folders. The easiest way to do this is to hold the Windows Key and press R to open the Run Dialog. In the Run Dialog, type the following path and click OK. If no *.edb files are found in the above path, then try the path below with a broader search.
   If no *.edb files are found in the path above, then try the path below with a broader search.
3. From here, type *.edb into the search box on the top right side of the File Explorer Window.
4. Now, open ‘Live Contacts View’. By default, it will automatically pick up the EDB file. However, if it’s not the one you need, please read further for additional guidance. Otherwise, save the files and import them into ‘Live Mail’. Then, drag each *.edb file you see into it to view the contacts stored in that EDB file.
   
5. Once you have identified the correct file, click on any contact and press the CTRL + A keys simultaneously to select all contacts. Then choose File -> Save Selected Items -> Save As (Comma Delimited Text File). Give the file a name and save it.
   
6. Now once the file is saved, you can open the CSV file and do the mappings by looking at the first field of the Live Contacts View, which will show data and value to help with the mapping. After the File Mapping has been done, the contacts can easily be imported into Live Mail.
7. Open Live Mail -> Import -> Comma Separated File and then do the correct mappings. If it goes wrong, don’t worry and start over.