Getting some control over Gmail's autocomplete

[drwex]

I'm writing this down mostly for my own benefit, but maybe others will find it useful. Question: how do you stop gmail from giving you address auto-completes that you know are bad?

Answer: it's in the Contacts, but somewhat hidden.

For people you have in a Contacts app, gmail gives you a top level "My Contacts". Click the dropdown next to the word Gmail in the upper left of the standard Web UI and select Contacts. Editing or deleting things here is a little tricky but not bad.

There is also a "secret" stash of "approximately everyone you ever mailed to or replied to EVAR" and that's the source of a lot of old/stale/bad address completions. Here's how to find that.

While in Contacts, click the dropdown next to "My Contacts". You might need to push Chat/Hangouts farther down the column to make space to see this. Below My Contacts are other frequently used contacts, any "Starred" contacts, any email groups you've created, any imported contacts, etc.

Below that are your G+ circles. Below that is "Most Contacted". And below THAT is a thing called "Other Contacts".

If you're like me, there are hundred or thousands of addresses in there, many of them old/bad/deprecated/should not be used. Find and delete them.

(Nearly every Web page I read on this topic was wrong, or out of date in giving this advice. Probably there are relevant pages somewhere that tell you all this, but I couldn't find them.)

Comments

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that useful information!

In addition

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

you can search and merge contacts so if it has filed different information on the same person in different files you can combine them. Just be careful what name it picks as the main one.