I want to delete old email addresses from the Compose window on my Mail app. Is there a way to do that?
Mail’s address field is auto-populated as you type with addresses from Contacts (formerly Address Book) as well as addresses you’ve previously sent and received email from. There’s no one-click way to clear all of those out, but you can remove them one by one — handy if you, say, tried to send a message to a misspelled address and that misspelling keeps coming up as an option.
Mail remembers previously emailed addresses that you never added to Contacts.
To do that, open a Compose window (Command-N), then start typing in the To field. If you see an address pop up that you want to clear out, first select it, which adds it to the To field. Now hover your mouse over it, click the downward-facing arrow to the right of the address, and choose Remove From Previous Recipients List. If that option isn’t there, then the email address is either in your Contacts app (choose Remove From Contacts to get rid of it), or perhaps it’s in your organization’s email directory (which you can’t edit), if you use an Exchange account.
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mac2school
February 06, 2013 at 1:46pm
yes, there IS a way to clear out those old addresses atone time...under the Window menu in mail choose Previous Recipients.
Anyone with an icon of a card is in your Contacts. So you can add folks you want to keep and then, select all, Edit, Delete...to clear the list. I recommend my clients do this every few months to avoid the mistakes and aggravation of old, incorrect addresses
