I am trying to forward a contact group from Outlook to another user in a different domain that uses outlook.

When I forward it to them ( as an outlook contact), they receive a .msg file with no contact information in it.

I was able to do this back in February and now my IT guy is telling me that nothing has changed on the network, but it does not look like a supported feature.

If I send it to another type of account(gmail), it gets converted to a .eml file and again has no contacts in the group.

I do not want to send this as an internet contact and have recipients manually cut and paste the address into a contact group.

Hi,

In Outlook 2013, I did a test to forward an Outlook Contact to a Gmail account:

I checked the email in Outlook Sent Items folder, the contact was saved as a .msg file; Then I checked the Gmail Inbox, the contact was saved as a .vcf file.

Then one more test to forward the Outlook Contact to my own Exchange account:

The contact was received as a .msg file.

So based on the tests above, my view is that the forwarded contacts are handled in different ways when being received in different mail systems. Anyway, you can ask the recipients to change the .eml and .msg extensions to .vcf, check if they can open and view the file.

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Su

It works with a single contact, but when I try and forward a contact group, I get this issue.

I have forwarded this to an Outlook.com and gmail.com account. Both accounts receive it as a .eml file, when viewed through a web browser.

If I connect it to my outlook and view it, it is a .msg. Both ways there are no contact stored in the attachment.

When I save the attachment and change the extension to .vcf, I get a blank contact, when I open it.

Thank You,

-Joshua

Hi,

I can experience the same that the .eml file can't be opened as a contact group in Outlook.

If you forward this contact group to your own Exchange account, this issue doesn't seem to happen.

Based on the experience above, I think it's basically how I described above, during the delivery process between different email systems, the contact group gets somehow converted and not accessible by Outlook, there seems to be few I can help in this process.

A workaround is to forward these contacts individually.

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Su

Sorry, but sending contacts individually would not be an easy way to update a contact list. I've instead just started sending it out as an internet contact and having them cut and paste the list into their Outlook.

I found a nice how-to that makes it simple for them.

http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/contacts/how-to-forward-a-distribution-list/

I'm leaving this marked as unanswered, because I'm hoping someone can show me the correct way to do this and not just a workaround.

Regards,

-Joshua

• Edited by Lukyhit 18 hours 10 minutes ago