My suggestion would be not to use Win8's mail app. I couldn't make sense of it either, and finally gave it up as a piece o' sh!t because there are alternatives. I'd bet that your contact list is in the People app. Its major promotional point, and indeed one of Win8's major promotional points, is that you can put all your files in the Cloud and access them from any computer anywhere, anytime. I don't view that as a positive. I see no good reason to want all my files sitting in a Microsoft server farm somewhere, if they're on my laptop I can access them from anywhere, anytime, as long as I have the laptop with me, and since that's what it's for, Microsoft seems to me to have a non- point. The email client I use--Mozilla Thunderbird--can access my ISP's mail server from anywhere I can get online, I've used it successfully in places as far afield as Victoria, Kelowna, Toronto, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and trains all over Scotland and England and Wales, so the email access-from-anywhere argument is moot too, plus all my messages and contact lists and whatnot are local on the laptop and available even if I can't get online.
Win8 seems to me in many ways to be a great leap backwards. I've also found it will not operate my scanner properly, despite both the vendor's (Epson) and Microsoft's claim that the drivers for it are in Win8. They are, but they're only about half functional, they cannot recognize the transparency holder. Epson's response to a service call was essentially, "Gee, that's too bad. Buy a new one." and Microsoft's was, "Not our problem, Epson supplies the drivers, we just stick 'em in the OS." Friend of mine has a similar problem with a Canon scanner. I'm inclined to suspect that any such device more than a year or two old isn't going to be fully functional with Win8.
