Every time I send emails to my Mom, it sends it to her old email address. I did go to the "previous recipients" window and remove the old email... but it STILL sends it to the old email! Really frustrating because I don't even notice it until later. Any other way to delete that info once and for all? Also, my address book has no mention of her old email. I dont' see where the computer is getting that email from !
Unless that email address is in your Address Book or in your list of Previous Recipients, there's no way you could have had that information auto-complete. It has to be somewhere, so you need to check again very carefully, even if you have to do a Spotlight search on that email address.
You should also remove all email addresses from the Previous Recipients window to be sure it's not there under any name or variation of her name.
I have the same issue. I am able to "Select All" from the previous recipients list window, and delete the entire list. Mail forgets about these folks and acts properly until quitting and restarting, whereupon the list repopulates itself just as before.
Does anyone know if there is a plist file or similar that holds this list and can be deleted?
I had the same problem and here's how I solved it:
1. Quit Mail, AddressBook, and probably all other apps would be a good idea.
1. Delete the ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/mailrecents-v4.xxxxxx file
2. When deleting this file, I had to type my admin password.
3. Restart Mail
4. Go to the Previous Recipients window.
5. Select one previous recipient and delete it, or do the following to empty your list:
6. Go to Edit>Select All
7. Delete the entire list
Now when you quit Mail and then restart it, the list should stay empty. The new file mailrecents-v4 that is created has different permissions. I'm sure there's an easier way to fix this just by selecting the mailrecents-v4 file that can't be edited and changing permissions, but too late for that ... mine is tossed out now and replaced by the new one with proper permissions.
Mail forgets about these folks and acts properly until quitting and restarting, whereupon the list repopulates itself just as before.
No, Mail does not repopulate the Previous Recipients list when you clear it and restart Mail. Previous Recipients are added only when you send an email.
I was about to post a new topic on Mail purging "previous recipients" by itself until I read your post in searching Discussions, wanted to share the following comments to add to the topic.
The other day the whole iMac froze (a very rare experience, it's been years) and I had to reboot using the power button.
I went into Console and although not a whiz at the program, found a message indicating some trouble backing up this '/mailrecents' file, at the same clock time the machine choked.
So I went in and deleted the file and rebooted, permissions repaired, etc and it seems back up and running. But the autocomplete in Mail, I used to type one letter of my wife's name and her address would pop up in the recipient field but now it auto-suggests someone else from Address Book. Then I looked in previous recipients to figure it out and there are only about six entries (I have about 9,000 messages in Mail).
Kind of an open question, that I haven't found in searching, is why you can rebuild the Mail database mailboxes, but you can't rebuild AddressBook. AB is critical to the success of using the Mac's integrated apps, but I've run in to so many problems, and the darn thing hasn't been updated in about forever, in terms of significant enhancements. Is there anyway to 'clean up' AB so it performs better, ie not losing data in groups and other odd behavior?
The AddressBook folder, found in Home/Library/Application Support has backup files from which to Restore. But if you mean rebuild from analysis of the message archives, that is not provided.
What is presently found in the AddressBook folder?