Tip of the Week: Stop Individual Email Addresses From Auto-completing

I often rely on Mail’s ability to auto-complete an email address based on the first few letters of the address. Sometimes, though, this comes back to bite me. A few days ago, I sent a message to a colleague’s personal Gmail address, and realized that Mail was auto-completing all the emails I wrote to the wrong address.

I asked Rebecca if it was possible to remove individual addresses from the cache of previously-used addresses, and we couldn’t find a solution. She pointed out that this task was very easy in Entourage, so I knew Apple had to have a way to do it.

Quick sleuthing in the Mail menus led me to the Previous Recipients item under Window. There, I saw a list of every address I’d sent mail to in the past years. The Previous Recipients window has a search box to easily locate individual addresses and buttons to remove an address or add it to your Address Book.