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How can I stop Mail from automatically adding email addresses to Contacts?

How do I stop email addresses automatically adding to Contacts?

MacBook, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)

Posted on Dec 10, 2014 12:13 PM

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Posted on Jan 14, 2015 5:57 PM

I'm getting a little tired of this myself. Everyone is so fond of saying that this doesn't happen, but it's happening to me as well. Whenever I send a message using the OS X Mail app, I suddenly find that same e-mail address in my contacts. It's been happening for months now, and I first noticed it when I was on Mavericks. It's still happening on Yosemite.

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Jan 14, 2015 5:57 PM in response to MamaCongo

I'm getting a little tired of this myself. Everyone is so fond of saying that this doesn't happen, but it's happening to me as well. Whenever I send a message using the OS X Mail app, I suddenly find that same e-mail address in my contacts. It's been happening for months now, and I first noticed it when I was on Mavericks. It's still happening on Yosemite.

Aug 6, 2015 7:44 PM in response to mjsagert

This seems to be isolated to using Mail on Yosemite when piping the email through an Office365 account. For some reason those added emails do not sync to the iPhone (would be another mess) and hence are only created on the Yosemite Mail side, I can't see those emails/contacts on the Office365 side, so the problem seems to be rather on the Yosemite Mail side displaying something that iOS or Office365 doesn't.

Feb 17, 2015 1:54 PM in response to PDADoc

Office 365 and Exchange accounts have a "Suggested Contacts" feature that has caused this problem for me. When I send messages through my Exchange account to email addresses not in my Exchange contact list (even if they are in a contacts list under another account), Exchange automatically adds their email address to my Exchange contacts. While there is a setting to disable this if I was using the Windows version of Outlook 2010/2013, I'm using Apple Mail, which means I cannot correct the problem. There doesn't appear to be a setting through my Office 365 online account that controls this "feature", either.


To address the issue for now, I have to manually clean up the Exchange contact list periodically. Thus in my case, this is a Microsoft problem, rather than an Apple problem. That may be why so many answers to this question are, "Mavericks/Yosemite does not do this".

How can I stop Mail from automatically adding email addresses to Contacts?

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