Windows Live Mail has been out for quite some time and it is a very nice breath of fresh air coming from Outlook Express. It’s a free application from Microsoft that can be ran on top of Vista or XP.
One quirk I noticed was one caused by Vista’s Instant Search when searching for Contacts located in Windows Live Mail. I would search for a contact and it would display twice in the search results. This is kind of annoying. Thankfully, there’s an easy fix.
The issue extends from how Instant Search automatically indexes the AppData folder under C:\Users, which contains data related to most of your programs. The issue is that there are in fact two folders containing your contacts, both of which are located in the folder C:\Users\<YOURUSER>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\Contacts\<EMAILACCOUNT>. In this folder are two additional folders, real and shadow. The shadow folder contains a backup of your contacts in real. It isn’t necessary to index both these, so we need to tweak the index locations. Here’s how:
- Because real and shadow aren’t allowed to be indexed by default, Instant Search will not allow you to modify them under Index Options. To remedy this, right-click on shadow, click on Advanced, and check Index this folder for faster searching.
- Launch Indexing Options under Control Panel.
- Navigate to C:\Users\<YOURUSER>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\Contacts\<EMAILACCOUNT> and uncheck the folder shadow. This will tell the indexer not to index this folder of duplicate contacts.
- Click OK and close the Indexing Options window.
- Allow for the indexer to update and you’re good to go.
