Cannot delete a contact in Outlook

The delete button is greyed out for contacts. Outlook REALLY does not want us to delete contacts

The world will be better if software companies are held to a higher standard. These clowns have no clue how their whole existence is built around creating frustrating experiences. No body cares. Shame on them.
Now to the point of eliminating suggested contacts.

To edit suggested contacts in Outlook, you can remove or hide a contact from the list:

1. Start typing the contact's name in the To: address line
2. Select the contact from the list of suggested contacts
3. Click the X icon to the right of the contact's name The contact will be removed from the list and hidden for future use. To unhide a contact, you can send an email to the contact within about 24 hours. You can also manage suggested recipients in Outlook by going to the Privacy page for your Microsoft account. Once there, you can:1. Scroll down to Privacy settings in our products
4. Select Expanded people suggestions
5. Set the toggle to Off I was able to follow the steps above and get rid of the personal email of my colleague from popping up in the company outlook, but now her official email is missing as well.

These large corporations do not have my well wishes, I hope one day all of these software engineers will get a taste of their own work ethic.......
It is so pathetic

Howdy,

After losing most of my hair, I think I have finally figured this out. There are TWO types of contacts in outlook.

1. Contacts: these are the ones that you have personally added
2. Xontacts: (that is my name) These are "contacts" that are "added" when you either received or send email to an address that is not in your Contacts. In the olden days, I used to call "inventions" such as these, "Gatisms" after Bill Gates.

All the talk about maintaining contacts has been about Contacts. Unfortunately, anything you do with a Xontact will have varying, almost unpredictable, results.

I have discovered though, that if I take a Xontact and add it to my Contacts, I can actually delete it. It is a painful process, but it has enabled me to eliminate "suggested contacts" which are related to, but not necessariy the same as Xontacts. I was then able to cleanse my contact list.

Hello, here is my 2 cents contribute in case it can help someone.

I have spent few hours on my Outlook 365 desktop app (business account, "new outlook" enabled) trying to remove contacts from the "People" page.

There were a bunch of old, invalid contacts listed under "Your contacts" tab and a subset of them also showed up when creating a new mail and clicking on the "To" button to select the recipients.

The "official" removal didn't worked: every time i selected one or more contact and clicked on the "delete" button, i get a pop up in the upper right area of the window with a "something went wrong" message. Moving the the web version, the same contacts had the delete button grayed out.

I've tried to switch to the "classic" outlook, but the contacts to be deleted were not shown.

I've even digged in the "AppData" subfolders under my user profile folder, but I wasn't able to find anything.

At last, I've found this solution (it worked for me - don't know if it applies to other).

Using Outlook 365 desktop app, "new Outlook":

• click on the three dots beside your e-mail address (be sure to have clicked the "mail" on the upper left)
• select "manage account"
• on the window that is displayed, click on "General" (on the left column) and then on "Offline" that is listed on the right of the column where "general" is
• disable "offline email, calendar and people"
• restart outlook

All "problematic" contacts shall be deleted now. Corporate address books are not affected and still searchable.

By re-enabling "offline email, calendar and people", the problematic contacts are not shown.

They are however displayed under the "my contacts" list when clicking on "To" in a new email.

Deleting search history didn't solve this.

Howdy,

After losing most of my hair, I think I have finally figured this out. There are TWO types of contacts in outlook.

1. Contacts: these are the ones that you have personally added
2. Xontacts: (that is my name) These are "contacts" that are "added" when you either received or send email to an address that is not in your Contacts. In the olden days, I used to call "inventions" such as these, "Gatisms" after Bill Gates.

All the talk about maintaining contacts has been about Contacts. Unfortunately, anything you do with a Xontact will have varying, almost unpredictable, results.

I have discovered though, that if I take a Xontact and add it to my Contacts, I can actually delete it. It is a painful process, but it has enabled me to eliminate "suggested contacts" which are related to, but not necessariy the same as Xontacts. I was then able to cleanse my contact list.

Can you go in abit more details how you exactly did that? Because I have some Xontacts I would love to get rid off on my outlook when I use the search function on it.