Exporting “Safe Senders” from Windows Live Mail

Last Updated on 20 March 2012 by gerry

This note relates to Windows Live Mail version 2009 (Build 14.0.8117.0416) running in Windows XP.

I found it impossible to export or copy ‘n’ paste the Safe Senders the addresses from Tools->Safety Options in my Windows Live Mail. I wanted to do this to import the list to the server-based Junk Mail filter provided by my email host.

A bit of digging about in the registry exposed the location of the Safe Senders list as


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\PerPassportSettings\0\Junk Mail\Safe Senders List]

Unfortunately each address is saved in a separate registry subkey, so a bit of text manipulation is required after exporting the above Registry key to a .REG file. I used Edit-Plus to sort the file, strip out the non-pertinent stuff and perform a find-and-replace on the lines containing the email addresses, which are of the format


"Exception"="goodfriend@gmail.com"

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