Contacts being added automatically on iPhone

TKaplan21 Said:

"Contacts being added automatically on iPhone: I have noticed many contact cards in my Contacts that I didn't add. They are people I sent emails to using Apple Mail on my Mac. How do I stop this from happening? Running the new iOS17 on a new iPhone 15 plus."

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Disable or Enable iCloud Contacts:

Is Contacts enabled in iCloud? If so, then it may be contact cards gathered from another device. If not, then try enabling Contact in iCloud Settings on you devices.

I am having the same issue with outlook. So I believe this is an iOS issue. What I have going on is, when work sends me an email, with contact information for someone else (phone numbers are the issue I am having) it is adding that phone number from the email I receive to that persons contact record in my phone. That phone number belongs to someone else. So person A, (who is in my contacts) sends me an email to call person B (who is ALSO in my contacts) my iphone see's that email and adds person B's phone number to person A's contact record. I found this out by mistake, when I sent a text message to person A and the text went to person B!! (which created quite a problem...as you can imagine) so how do I turn this off? I can not find any option other than turning off my contact sync in the outlook part under the settings/mail in my phone.

Using iphone 13 Pro and it is happening with Apple Mail on my iphone! Please help!

My contact list is now unmanageable!

To solve this problem:

On your Iphone in a broswer go to gmail.

select the account in the drop down

select "manage accounts on this device."

choose your gmail account

"manage google account"

slide the menu to the right and select "people and sharing"

select "contact info saved from interactions".

if you have more than one google account you will need to do it for each account on your iphone.

Hope this helps!

Apple, Goggle, MS don't you realize that all of you are becoming to complex and annoying to deal with? The more they try to add or change or make thing better, they make it worse.

But this doesn't solve for when someone emails me. I'm tired of getting an email from say a recruiter, and then they pop permanently into my private contacts. All these 1x contacts! Help!

TKaplan21 Said:

"I do have Contacts enabled in iCloud on both my iPhone and my Mac. If I turn those off won't the syncing between those devices stop so that when I do update or add a contact myself it won't flow through to the other device?"

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Inaccessibly of Contacts on Devices:

Yes. If not downloaded, then it will not sync between your devices. For contacts to be available across you devices, then Contacts must be enabled in iCloud settings on all devices associated to your Apple Account.

I would recommend everyone upgrade to iOS 17.2.1. I was having this issue in iOS 17.1 and after upgrading to 17.2 I no longer have the issue. I didn't do anything else. Subsequently upgraded to 17.2.1 today and still no issues. Hope others have the same experience after upgrading.

This is not exactly correct. It is not on the left navigation panel; it is on right side of your Gmail account screen. Click on the gears icon for settings. Click “all settings”. Scroll down to close to the middle of the page where it reads “ create contacts for auto complete”. Click “I’ll add contacts myself”. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click save changes.

On the right side of your Gmail account screen, Click on the gears icon for settings. Click “see all settings”. Scroll down to close to the middle of the page where it reads “create contacts for auto complete”. Click “I’ll add contacts myself”. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click save changes.

Do you know if this will affect the ability of Apple Mail to auto populate email addresses from prior correspondences?

For instance, if I start a new email and begin typing a name in the To: field, "Dan..."

A drop-down list of names that begin with Dan appears (and the associated email):

Dan A - dana@gmail

Danny Z - dannyz@gmail

None of these individuals are saved into my i/macOS Contacts app, so I assume this feature works based off of prior correspondences to these individuals. This is a convenient feature that I do not want to lose.

However, I too am having the problem you described: emails recently began to be added to my i/macOS Contacts, sometime even appearing as DanA@gmail, etc. I also found instances of duplicated contacts. I changed no settings myself, so I suspect that it must be related to an i/macOS update and/or a gmail setting.

Seems like a highly undesirable effect, so not sure why Apple/Google would impose it as the default setting (instead of an opt-in approach).

It worked sort-of.

when taking out the gmail contacts, a lot of my local contacts are deleted as well.

Anyone got this as well?

I only save my contacts locally on my phone, they’re not linked to gmail …

This worked for me, thanks!

I was on the phone with Apple Support earlier to ask about this but he couldn’t figure it out and told me I’d have to contact Google cuz it’s on their end.

When we were doing screen share, he even had me go into Google settings to do something so not sure how he didn’t know but oh well.

No. That is not what is happening. THey are actually new entries in the contacts list. It's annoying AF because anyone I emailed with now is in my contacts, and it's too numerous to manually delete.