Review: The Add Contacts Add-In for Microsoft Outlook

Automatically add new contacts to your Outlook address book

By
Heinz Tschabitscher
Heinz Tschabitscher
Heinz Tschabitscher
Writer
  • University of Vienna
A former freelance contributor who has reviewed hundreds of email programs and services since 1997.
lifewire's editorial guidelines
Updated on March 18, 2020
Address book with pen inside

Martin Hospach / Getty Images

Add-ins for the Microsoft Outlook email client are utilities from Microsoft third-party partners that help you automate message tasks. One helpful add-in is Add Contacts, from MAPILab, which automatically adds email addresses to a contact folder when you reply to a message or send a new message.

Here's a look at how Add Contacts works.

Add Contacts is compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007, 2003, and 2002/XP, as well as Outlook for Microsoft 365.

How Add Contacts Works

While adding contacts to Outlook is a simple process, it's easy to miss some contacts, or lose contacts entirely if you receive a lot of email messages in your inbox.

Add Contacts completely automates this process. Anytime you reply to a message or send a new message, Add Contacts automatically adds that email address to your Outlook contact folder or any folder you choose as the contact destination, either in your personal mailbox or in public folders on Microsoft Exchange server.

Add Contacts has an automatic name-detection feature. It tries to figure out the contact's name from the email address and by scanning the message body for contact possibilities. It can automatically assign your contacts to categories or assign them to categories that you specify. The utility will even check for duplicates before adding a contact.

Direct the program to scan your sent mail to collect new addresses. It can't scan other folders this way, however.

Screenshot of Add Contacts

Outlook 2000 had a feature that built an address book automatically. When users replied to a message, the recipient was added to the contacts list. This feature was removed in later versions, but Add Contacts revives this feature.

Add Contacts Subscription Info

Download a free trial of Add Contacts to test it out. Afterward, a single-user license for Add Contacts costs $15. The company says this is a one-time fee that includes one year of technical support and a year of version updates, but after a year, you do have to pay an additional fee to renew tech support and keep getting version updates.

For bigger organizations, a five-user license is $70, a 10-user license is $120, a 25-user license is $280, a 50-user license is $500, and a 100-user license is $750.

Give the program a try if you want to save the time and hassle of adding contacts, or if you never want to lose a contact again.

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