Importing Contacts Into Outlook.com Limited To 50 Per Import

When I saw that I could only import 50 at a time, I broke the file down and save them into 50 contacts for each file. Then I imported each set of 50 and it worked fine! I also found out that you can only delete 50 at a time - that is a pain.

I'm in the process of importing contacts from a .CSV file into Outlook.com via my web browser using the Manage Import Contacts option.

During the import process, after a few seconds a message will eventually appear:

Something went wrong

The format of the file isn't correct. Please be sure that the file was exported in the Outlook CSV format.

Couple observations:

1.) After the import fails, I have verified that the first 50 contacts in the .CSV file DOES get imported.

2.) I modified the .CSV file by removing the 50 contacts that were successfully imported. I then repeated the import and again, the first 50 contacts were successfully imported and I received the same error message.

3.) I repeated this same process and for each import, an additional 50 contacts were successfully imported.

4.) Since the first 50 contacts are successfully being imported, this would indicate that the file is correctly formatted.

Ask:

1.) Can you verify that the Outlook.com contact import feature is limited to 50 contacts per import? Based on what I'm seeing, it certainly seems to be the case. If there is no limit, why is this error happening?

2.) The error message that appears regarding the file being in the incorrect format is not intuitive at all. The file format is in the correct format and it seems Outlook.com has some other issue. Could this error message be updated to provide information that is more relevant?

There's another solution to this if you're using Outlook on Windows, have a little patience and a smattering of technical ability.

This application adds the CalDAV and CardDAV support that Google Contacts and Calendar uses to Outlook for Windows.

It's fairly simple to use it to add a Google Contacts address book or Google Calendar (the ones in your account) to Outlook. Just when you're playing with it, be mindful of the merge directions and choose settings that will only go in a direction to add from Google at first and use the manual sync until you're sure you've got it right.

https://caldavsynchronizer.org/

It's free and it's fairly self-explanatory.

If you do this, you can sync your Google Contacts to your mobile Outlook devices just by opening Outlook on your desktop every now and then. It creates the Google Contacts book on Outlook Live too, so it syncs across your mobile devices (and any other place you have an Outlook client installed). I've tested it on Android version of Outlook, and as long as you don't let Outlook for Android (or any other flavour I suppose) have access to sync your device's native contact list, you shouldn't have any problems with duplicate items in there. In Outlook for Android at least, the the items will appear twice while the sync is completing but then, as long as they're completely identical, you should end up with a single list but with two labels to reflect the MyContacts and Google Contacts (or whatever you name the Google Contacts address book in Outlook for Windows when you set it up with CalDav Synchronizer).

It's not perfect but it works. If nothing else it will get the contacts ingested into Outlook relatively neatly compared to CSV file ingestion. Then you can copy them into Outlook's native contact address book, turn off the auto sync on the Google contact address book (that part is *crucial* if you want to keep them on Google's webmail etc) and delete them out of your Google contacts folder on your desktop. Delete the whole directory if you want. Then you're just working with a set of Outlook contacts between your desktop and mobiles etc.

Note: You can also use the CalDav Synchronizer to bring your gmail calendar into Outlook for Windows the same way.

And, no, I have no association with the CalDav Synchronizer developers. It's open source and free anyway.

Good Luck.

When I saw that I could only import 50 at a time, I broke the file down and save them into 50 contacts for each file. Then I imported each set of 50 and it worked fine! I also found out that you can only delete 50 at a time - that is a pain.

You can actually delete more than 50 at a time if you have desktop Outlook.

1. Get out of People/Contacts and go back to your email folders.
2. Find the one marked 'deleted items' and empty that. (if you've had a few failed attempts deleting live online and on your phone or anywhere else it could be pretty full on the IMAP server and constantly duplicating that issue)
3. If it's emptied then you should see a hyperlink that says "Recover items recently removed form this folder". There might be thousands of potential items to recover but don't be fooled by the wording. Opening this will bring up a dialogue box that lets you purge ALL the deleted items.
4. You should see a list of all these items which are not obviously but clearly all the built up items. Notice the two radio buttons at the bottom.
5. Check the purge button selector and then 'Select All" and hit okay. You'll get a warning that doing it will zap it off the IMAP folder on the server but that's okay as long as you have your CSV back-up. It will carry through to all your devices which is the whole point of IMAP.

At least this way you can start over and try other things to get the contacts imported correctly such as maybe another version of Outlook. I use both Mac and Windows OSes so I will try it on the Mac and see if the contacts survive without getting mangled but I'm not holding out much hope.

I see no technical obstacle to such a simple task that only succeeds to a mysterious point than just stops. I suspect there's a commercial imperative here.

Good luck

I did exactly the same. If i'm honest, i actually found it easier to deal with 50 contacts at a time rather than the hundreds that i have.

:-)

Thank you for your time. Yes, I know I can break the csv import file in segments containing no more than 50 contacts, but that is annoying. MS should give an explanation to this new inconvenience, because this used to work fine for years, until now.

On the othe hand, in gmail, yahoo mail, etc., there is no limit for the contacts in the csv import file.

Bottom line: I quit using my outlook.com accounts and forget it until the 50 contacts limit is retired.

Thank you again.

I have the same question/issue. 350 contacts CSV exported from Google, trying to importinto outlook.com / which only imports 50.

This was working early January so must have been a change in Microsoft's backend.