How to delete Skype for Business Contacts from Outlook

This shouldn’t be this hard, but for some reason it is.  If you end up with rogue contacts in your Outlook “Skype for Business Contacts”, here’s a quick video demonstrating how to find and clean them up. The notice if you try and do this directly in Outlook is “You cannot make changes to contents of this read-only folder”.

The URL it references by the way for the “light” Exchange Online mode is here: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/?exsvurl=1&layout=light

How to delete Skype for Business Contacts from Outlook from itgroove on Vimeo.

26 responses to “How to delete Skype for Business Contacts from Outlook

  1. Nice one! Thank you very much for posting this. I had been looking for a solution for months…

  2. Good stuff – I searched for ages for the answer to dealing with this particular “feature”. Thanks!

  3. Thank you, it’s working, but i would like to know, how only few contacts are getting added into outlook skype for Business contacts list.

  4. This Thread Saved me!

    I’ve been trying to figure out why my Outlook 2016 would hang and not respond. The sync issues folder always shows “error syncing skype for business contacts”

    Seems having 260,000 contacts in there would be a good reason. Sadly I have to delete 100 at a time since I can’t do all within Outlook

  5. Amazing. This has vexed me for a long time, and it turns out I am part of the solution… Thx.

  6. Thanks man, i used your advice to delete an SFB bug that duplicated a contact hundreds of times !

    BTW : I noticed that in the “light” Exchange Online interface, if you search for the contact and then click the ‘Select All’ box, the multi-user deletion does not work! you have to stay in the normal contact display view and select them all manually… only then does the delete occur.

  7. Thank you very much. You saved my day. After SIP domain change was struggling for weeks how to get rid of saved UCS contacts from Outlook.

  8. Thank you very much!
    this was super helpful. i was dealing with this problem for a month and your post helped.

  9. Dude,,,,,I love you!!!! My IT Dept thought I was crazy for a while until it started happening to other employees using the Attendant Pro program.

  10. Thanks, other “solutions” found on the internet did not work, this did the trick! I had over 6000 bogus Lync contacts (some bizarre phone number only)… And now my phone syncs to my car much faster!

  11. I’ve been researching how to remove my personal contacts from my work environment (Skype for Business and Outlook) for months. Removing the contacts from Outlook finally did the trick. Thank you!!

  12. I had a coworker who had hanged her name and I couldn’t get it changed in my Skype for Business Contacts (365). I had searched all over for the solution. Deleted Skype cache multiple times to no avail. Thank you so much for posting this solution.

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