Address book file is a sequence of following records: TAddrRecType = packed record Shortcut: string[128]; Name: string[128]; Email: string[128]; end; About Pascal strings: string[n] takes n+1 bytes. 0th byte of a record is an actual length of string. For example, string[6], which contains the string "test" (without quotes) will be represented as 04 74 65 73 74 00 00 Last two 00 00 can be any random value.