Is there any way of stopping Mail from retaining the email addresses of people to whom one has previously sent emails?
This feature has the great disadvantage that if one wants to send an email to a contact who has changed her/his email address and one types the name into the address field of a new email, Mail may enter an obsolete address which one may not recognize as obsolete.
Mac mini, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)
Further to the above, I have now found the following in these Discussions, but under OS 10.5 (Leopard).
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MulderOct 3, 2008 1:50 PM Re: turning off previous recipient memorization
Re: turning off previous recipient memorizationin response to Chris R.If you want to disable the Previous Recipients feature, you can do it with this command in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.mail SuppressAddressHistory -bool true
Neither Mail nor Address Book should be running at the time you do this. As the OP stated they don't want anyone in that list except people who are in their Address Book, if they add someone to their address book, they will need to reverse this command before that person could be added to the Previous Recipients list.
Mulder
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Before I risk trying this, can anyone tell me whether it will work or, on the contrary, do terrible things in Mountain Lion (10.8.5)? And if it works, will
defaults write com.apple.mail SuppressAddressHistory -bool false
restore the function, should I wish to do so at a later date?
Many thanks in anticipation.
This feature has the great disadvantage that if one wants to send an email to a contact who has changed her/his email address and one types the name into the address field of a new email, Mail may enter an obsolete address which one may not recognize as obsolete.
Which is why you can just simply clear the previous recipients from time to time. Otherwise, it's a great feature.
The email client I used to use before I turned to Apple Mail had this feature, too — but one could turn it on or off. That was a great feature.
What would be an even greater feature would be to have the collection of email addresses permanently on, but to have the choice of whether the collected ones go into the address fields of new emails or not.
PS: Actually there is a way of having one's cake and eating it: there is a simple app. called Email Contacts Extractor.app which will export all email addresses (from 'Previous recipients' as well as from Contacts, and from wherever they have been stored) as a cvs file that can be opened in Excel. (Beware! The free version will only extract 20 e-addresses.) So one can preserve the secrets of one's past in electronic aspic before clearing 'Previous recipients', and can search the cvs file for particular addresses, while preventing obsolete addresses appearing when addressing a new email.
Michael Graubart wrote:
The email client I used to use before I turned to Apple Mail had this feature, too — but one could turn it on or off. That was a great feature.
What would be an even greater feature would be to have the collection of email addresses permanently on, but to have the choice of whether the collected ones go into the address fields of new emails or not.
Where to send product feedback to Apple:
Mail: How to disable 'Previous recipients'?
