Windows Address Book

~ the goodbye ~

Windows Address Book arrived on 13 August 1996 inside Internet Explorer 3, which is a strange place to ship an address book until you remember what Microsoft thought a browser was going to be. IE3 came with a mail and news client attached, and the contact list underneath it was the part meant to be shared. Any program on the machine could open it. In practice one program did, constantly, and that was Outlook Express.

Underneath it was a single file with a .wab extension sitting in your profile, plus an API that other software could call. It could also query LDAP directory servers, which was the enterprise half of the design and the half nobody at home ever touched. What people touched was the other half. There were separate tabs for a person's home details and their work details, contacts filed into groups and folders, and import and export through vCard or CSV. There was also a checkbox to send one particular contact plain text only, because you did not trust their mail reader with anything fancier.

It replaced Cardfile, the index-card program that had been in Windows since 1985 and had no concept of email at all. It was replaced in turn by Windows Contacts, which threw out the single file and gave every person their own .contact file in a folder. Vista reached consumers on 30 January 2007, and from that day a new Windows PC did not have a Windows Address Book on it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the part that went wrong ~

A shared contact list readable by any program on the machine is a convenience right up until the program doing the reading was mailed to you. In May 2000 the ILOVEYOU worm arrived as an attachment, and one of the things it did on opening was walk the address book and send itself onward to everybody in it. There was no guessing and nothing to scrape. The addresses were sitting in a documented format that the operating system invited software to read.

What followed was five years of mail worms that all worked broadly the same way, and a generation of spammers who figured out that a compromised desktop contains a pre-verified list of real human addresses. The .wab file was doing exactly what it had been built to do the entire time, which was hand a person's contacts to whatever asked for them.

~ what it felt like from here ~

This one I actually lived in. Home internet in Turkey in the early 2000s meant dial-up, and dial-up meant you connected, pulled your mail down into Outlook Express, and hung up to read it. MSN Messenger owned conversation and email owned everything else, and everything else came through this program with this address book behind it.

So I was on the receiving end of the worm years in the ordinary way, which is that mail turned up from people who had definitely not written it. A classmate, or a mailing list you had been on once. The giveaway was that the sender was always someone real, because that was the point of reading the address book instead of making addresses up. For a couple of years the default assumption about an attachment from a friend was that the friend had nothing to do with it.

~ the file outlived the program ~

The file format outlived the program by a long way. Old .wab files kept turning up on machines for years afterward, and Outlook could still import them, and there is a whole small trade in tools that convert them into something modern. One undocumented registry switch used to make Outlook and the Address Book share a single contact list, and it stopped working after Outlook 2003 on XP, which is the sort of detail that only ever mattered to the person it broke for.

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