Mail address autofill Click to see a larger image

I had a question from a reader this week that went something like this:

A friend of mine changed her email address and I updated it in Address Book. How come Mail's address autofill is still bringing up the wrong address?

Good question. The answer is that Mail looks one other place for the autofill address before it looks in Address Book.

Mail has a list called Previous Recipients that you can access from Window on the Menu Bar. As the name suggests, Mail keeps a listing of everyone you have received email from. It pulls from that list first before going to your Address Book for matches. That means that when type the name of the person into the To: field in a new Mail message, the old address is going to show first (from the Previous Recipients list) and the new address second (from Address Book.)

I had the same situation when my sister's email address changed when her broadband cable company changed names. Since I couldn't remember which company bought which I was always confused as to which was the right address. Then, to make things slightly more confusing, once Mail figured out that I was using the new address more than the old one, it switched the order so now the current address shows up before the old one in autofill.

All you need to do to eliminate the old address from autofill (and what I should have done a long time ago) is open the Previous Recipients window, locate the old address and click Remove from List. The old address will no longer show up in autofill.

Related Items: Mail | Address Book