Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
How do I remove email addresses from the autocomplete list in iPhone or iPad Mail apps? I know how to do this in Mac OS X Mail. But the iOS Mail apps don't seem to provide a way to remove old, dead or unwanted email addresses that you don't want autocomplete to list when you start typing in an email address.
They're actually quite different problems because one involves addressed that were typed in and the other addresses synced from another service that's been tightly integrated into the OS.
There is one more thing I just found out you need to do: make sure the old address also has been deleted from your Address Book. I had the same problem and callled Apple Care and that was their solution, which worked for me.
Answered by Allen Sampson on another thread:
Try turning Contacts off for FaceBook at Settings > FaceBook.
Well, I think it is a bug!
It's certainly not solved by deleting the old addresses from your iMac and then synching the phone using iCloud or via iTunes.
It seems to be a problem of the way that the Erase function still leaves the data on the memory card. Unlike the iMac, you don't have a 'secure erase' on the iPhone. If you use the 'search your iPhone' facility and type in the old address you want to eradicate, it will 'find' e-mails you sent using this old address. In fact it will 'find' any e-mails you deleted and removed from the trash. Of course it hasn't really found them, only the ghosts of the headers that are cluttering up the memory somewhere on the phone.
If these deleted e-mails and old addresses are still lurking on the memory card then what is required is an app like the Disk Utility that will securely erase all the free space by writing zeroes into all the unused memory spaces.
BTW I'm going to go and search for one - some hope!
Dear jwwalke,
I have just found your post and wanted to thank you for describing the solution. This issue has been bothering my wife for several years and we are very grateful to you for helping us to finally solve it.
Best wishes and thanks again.
I have version 6.0.1 my iPhone 4, and there is not an option for Contacts in Facebook under Settings. ???
When I do as you suggested, the addresses I want to remove do NOT have arrows next to them. So I tried sending an email to them so that they would be considered 'recent', but after exiting mail and going back in, nothing had changed. The unwanted addresses still came up, and did not have an arrow next to them. Any other suggestions?? Thanks much!
Thank you, this solved my question.
Thank you, jwwalke. Today is January 18, 2014, and I just received notification from the Apple Support Communities that a resolution to this problem was now available. You posted your solution in 2012, so it took many, many months to find its way to me, I guess.
Anyway, with your solution I was finally able to remove the addresses I no longer wanted to see on my iPhone. The only difference was that instead of seeing an arrow to the right of the unwanted address, there was a blue 'i' in a circle to the right. I clicked on that and was taken to a page where 'Remove from Recents' was shown in red. After clicking on this, the name was removed and never came up again. Thanks again!!
The problem of this solution is that it's not generic.
It doesn't solve my issue. I want to clean everything at once!!!
How do you remove email addresses from autocomplete?
