turning off previous recipient memorization

Sorry, but you can't do what you're describing. If you want to eliminate Previous Recipients, you'llhave to do it manually; there's no way around that.

Mulder

This is a very annoying feature sometimes. There doesn't seem to be a way to disable this in the GUI prefs, but I wonder if there's property that can be pushed into the plist file from the terminal. Something like (just an example; don't use this):

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail DisablePreviousRecipients -bool YES

Problem is, I'm unsure what the key value pair (the last bit of string above) would be for this option, if it even exists. Anyone else out there have a lead?

I have discovered the way to turn this feature off, but it will have to wait until
I get home from work before I can post it.

Mulder

If you want to disable the Previous Recipients feature, you can do it with this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.mail SuppressAddressHistory -bool true

Neither Mail nor Address Book should be running at the time you do this. As the OP stated they don't want anyone in that list except people who are in their Address Book, if they add someone to their address book, they will need to reverse this command before that person could be added to the Previous Recipients list.

Mulder