Delete auto complete e-mail address from my ipad

No. The mail app remembers those addresses and there is no way to remove them for the maill app at the present time. You cannot delete them - unless you really want to restore your iPad.

If you restore from a backup of your iPad - I believe that the old email addresses will still be there. If you restore as a new device and then add all of your content from iTunes back onto the iPad, then the addresses should not be there.

Email addresses that are not in your address book will be deleted on their own after a period of non use. Just ignore the one you do not want and as long as it is not in your address book it will go away eventually.

Restoring the device is a bit radical just to remove remembered email addresses - and that was why I included this line from my original response ....

..... unless you really want to restore your iPad.

These remembered email addresses seem to really bother some users for reasons known only to them.

"for reasons known only to them?"

No, for very obvious reasons. Contacts we correspond with get a new email address. We updare our address books to reflect this. And then, when we go to email them, Mail.app suggests and auto-completes based on their old email address. With hundreds (if not thousands) of contacts, we really shouldn't be expected to remember which email addresses are current and active and which are not. That's why we have address books that we update.

What is the length of the required period of non use? Is it strictly elapsed time, or is it some type of count? Is there any way to accelerate it?

The problem with this eventual disappearance approach is that if the user even once uses the old, bad address that comes up, then presumably the required period of non use would have to start all over again. (I know from personal experience how easy it is to briefly forget not to use the auto-complete address that comes up first; "just ignore" is easier said than done…)

Using the correct address does not seem to make it show in the auto-complete list before the old, bad address, which seems to me to be the obvious behavior, i.e., always show the last used address first in the autocomplete list for any given name.

Apple has for years understood the need to delete autocomplete entries for old, bad email addresses on OS X, so why did they (a) provide no reasonable way to do this on iOS, and (b) make no visible attempt to provide it in response to customer complaints?

Since it apparently requires a factory restore to remove even one old, incorrect auto-complete email address that shows before current, correct addresses, is there any way to simply turn off auto-complete for email addresses?

I searched and could not find it, so I am afraid that it might not exist. How hard would it be for Apple to respond to at least three years of customer complaints about incorrect email address auto-completion by at least providing the ability to turn it off?

Apple provides this in keyboard settings for text autocomplete, which I soon turned it off because I got fed up with my correct grammar being changed to incorrect grammar, and my correctly-chosen words being replaced by similar words with totally different meanings. I am much happier with it off.

You can delete the unwanted/unused/bad email from the iOS address book auto complete without restoring your iDevice.

1. Go to compose new email and begin typing in the recipient.

2. When the auto complete shows possible entries look for the bad/unused email address.

3. The bad/unused email address will have a blue arrow to the right of it.

4. Touch the arrow and the screen will display "Recent"

5. Touch "Remove From Contact"

The email address will be deleted and never return again unless you physically input it into your recipient field.

Hope this helps

Wow, cool.

I start typing a name, and before selecting one from the list of matches, I see the blue arrow on some (I guess these are the names presented because they've recently been corresponded with, and not because I've entered them into my Address Book.)

When I tap the blue arrow, I simply see a red button at the bottom of the next screen that says "Remove From Recents."

So that should work fine. Now why is this the first we've heard of this? Is this a new feature in iOS 6?

I'm not sure if its an iOS 6 feature or not.

I'm pretty sure I've seen it in iOS 5 as well.

No, this is definitely new in iOS 6. (If it were in iOS 5 or earlier, this thread would have played out a lot differently. 😉 )

I have just checked iOS 5 on an iPhone 4 and iPad 3, and this feature is NOT there.

It is, however, there on my iPhone 5, running iOS 6. Good work, Apple!

I just finished checking as well on iOS 5 and its not there.

This is definitely in iOS 6 which is good, but not for those that can't or don't want to update their iOS.

Many thanks for pointing this out jwwalke; it works for me on my iPad 2 running iOS 6, and I can FINALLY get rid of all the annoying out-of-date addresses that come up in preference to current, recently-used correct addresses.

Why did Apple take so long (at least three years) to fix this, and why, (unless I missed it), did they not tell their users about it?

I don't quite understand what causes a blue arrow. For example, when I entered "Jeff" in the recipient field, perfectly valid and unique addresses with "Jeff" as part of the last name were shown with blue arrows, but I would definitely not want to delete them.