Windows Live Mail is one of the most widely used e-mail applications, and the best choice by most home and basic Windows users, it’s free and comes with Essentials application suite provided by Microsoft though the offical support for it will end on January 10, 2017 (four days) after this post. Many people still use it on their Windows 10. Since this is an old applicatation and most users of it running for years i can imagine that as with any software, this can also go corrupt for one reason or another and a user may end up with no contacts, or all contacts gone/missing. Luckily, and fortunately Live Mail stores the data locally in the AppData folder in a *.edb file. This is the file that contains all your contacts, and you can use it to Restore the Contacts.
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 Delete or Lost Windows Live Mail Contacts
- To start the process, Close Live Mail if it is open and click (here) to download the Live Contacts View application. Extract the file to a location you remember so that you can open it in the steps ahead when needed.
- 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 Run Dialog. In the Run Dialog, type the following path and Click OK.
If no *.edb files are found in the path above, then try the path below with a broader search
- From here, type *.edb into the search box on the top right side of the File Explorer Window.
- Now, open Live Contacts View (by default) it will automatically pick up the EDB file but if it’s not the one you want then read further else save them and import into Live Mail, and drag each *.edb file you see into it to view the Contacts stored in that EDB File.
- Once you have identified the correct file, click on any contact and press CTRL + A key’s simultaneously to select ALL contacts and then chose File -> Save Selected Items -> Save As (Comma Delimited Text File) give the file a name and save it.
- 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.
- Open Live Mail -> Import -> Comma Separated File and then do the correct mappings. If it goes wrong, don’t worry and start over.
