Email addressee "auto-complete" entries

I and several friends have noticed the annoying behavior of some email applications to pull up multiple email addresses for a friend when entering part of a name or partial email ID in the To: field of a new email. With a careful search I found the following two (of many articles) that address the issue:



How to Clean Up Your Gmail Autocomplete List
I searched through my Google contacts for certain friends and did indeed find a few automatic contact entries, along with multiple email addresses saved in some of the contacts that I built myself. I weeded out the older, unused email addresses and see great improvements in what appears when I start to compose a new email.

I also found some older email addresses associated with Google+ Circles that I had assigned in the past. I had to remove these entries from the affected Circles and, where desired, add the current, valid contacts to the Circles.  Call it Spring cleaning.

How to stop old email addresses appearing automatically in the ‘To’ field in mail app
This article is specific to the Apple mail program.

73,
John

Webmail Address Book Bloat

Users of some webmail programs find that their address books or contact lists may become bloated with many email addresses they did not intentionally add. This is usually the result of an option in the webmail program's settings to automatically add all recipients' email addresses to the sender's address book or contacts list. For a one-time or infrequent original or reply email, a sender may or may not want to add the recipient to his or her address book.

Shown below are screen shot fragments that illustrate where to find the applicable option for the webmail clients of AT&T Yahoo email and AOL/AIM email. Click on each image for a larger view.

AT&T Yahoo Email

AT&T Yahoo webmail inbox showing Options link

Where to pick More Options

Where to find the applicable option

 AOL / AIM Email

Inbox showing link for Settings

Where to find the applicable setting

 
Another source of address book clutter relates to spam filtering. When an email program has identified an email as possible spam by tagging it or placing it in a user's spam folder, a webmail user may designate a desired email as not spam. Some webmail programs will then add the sender's email address to the reader's address book so that future emails from that sender are not treated as spam.