How to Delete EMail Addresses from Gmail Auto-Complete
by jim on January 14th, 2010Out of all the people in the world, I email my wife the most (awww… isn’t that sweet?). However, when she quit her job last year and went back to school for her Ph.D, I had an annoying problem every time I drafted an email to her. When I would start typing her name in the To: box, it would always suggest her work email address. And every time, I would have to navigate to one of the other email addresses Gmail had on file for her.
It was only a minor annoyance so I let it go for a few months but it turns out the solution is quite simple. GMail maintains a list of your contacts even if you never add them to your address book and it uses that list to help you auto-complete email addresses. To remove an address from the list, do the following:
- Click on Contacts in the left sidebar, it’s under your labels and above Tasks and the Chat box.
- Then click on All Contacts to show your list of contacts.
- Check the boxes that you want to remove, then click Delete contact(s) all the way to the right.
I circled the Contacts link in red and the Delete contacts button in green, here’s what it looks like:
That’s it, no more auto-completing old email addresses that don’t even work anymore.
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January 14th, 2010 at 11:19 am
Yep, I had to figure this out last summer when my wife quit her job to be a stay at home mom. It took a couple days of annoyance to spur me on to action.
June 3rd, 2010 at 11:01 am
Unfortunately, simply deleting contact (from ‘All Contacts’) resolves NOTHING for me. I DELETED my ex b/f’s e-mail address from ALL CONTACT list looong time ago. I even searched his address in econtact folder. It doesn’t show up, zero results. Yet when I type first letter of his addy, it still tries to auto-complete it for me!!! So totally annoying, I can’t believ Google doesn’t bother to fix this problen!
March 3rd, 2011 at 2:40 pm
Olga is correct. Deleting from All Contacts does not remove them from auto-complete!
April 12th, 2011 at 4:36 am
I totally agree with Olga. Have been having the same issue.
April 18th, 2011 at 10:20 am
Unfortuneatley this isn’t the problem I’m describing. My problem is that my old email address appears in the FROM box not the TO box. I deleted it from contacts but it still appears as one of my FROM contacts.
Any ideas??
May 7th, 2011 at 9:09 am
Not all of the email automatically load up into the Contacts section. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for all contacts.
May 17th, 2011 at 1:09 am
This was the perfect solution to my problem! Thank you for taking the time to post it here.
May 31st, 2011 at 9:23 pm
Great tip, thanks!
If this didn’t work for you, did you try signging out and getting back in? Did the trick for me.
June 27th, 2011 at 10:09 am
Sign out worked for me.
June 30th, 2011 at 10:11 am
If you go to contacts and click on the email address you want to delete put your mouse over the email address and click on the picture of the trash, it will delete the email. Once you do that you delete the name (if you put one) and then when you go to type and email and you type the first letter of that persons email address, it won’t show up. But when you go to your contacts list, there will be a blank bar there.
July 4th, 2011 at 10:00 am
I too have names come up after changing the contact info. in Contacts. In contacts I tried searching for the name of the person I wanted to remove the auto old address for and low and behold both old and new address showed up. I tried deleted the address card with the old info. Closed out of g-mail and reopened. The seems to have solved my problem.
Greg – to correct the from issue click on the settings icon in the upper right corner of the gmail window – it looks like a little gear. Click on the account and import tab and you will see a send mail as choice where you can select the e-mail you want to send from.
July 30th, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Unfortunately I dont have a Delete Contacts Option on my page and under more actions, the delete contacts is not accessible
Anybody know how to solve this
Thanks
September 2nd, 2011 at 11:06 am
For me I found the undesired contacts under “Other Contacts” and “All Contacts” even does not exist. May be something new brought in by google.
September 7th, 2011 at 2:57 am
fran, that worked!
I copied the email address that I did not want to appear in auto – complete and searched on contacts. I deleted the contact associated, then i had to log out and log back in.
Fantastic! I have been searching for this answer for a long time!
September 13th, 2011 at 7:17 am
Finally, and answer that worked. So glad to find this answer. The only thing that was different on my page was there wasn’t an All contacts listing. to click on to in the upper right hand corner. Other contacts is the wording that I had to click on to that is located below the Contacts word. This is where the auto complete email addresses were listed.
Thanks for your help.
October 9th, 2011 at 12:34 pm
In the new Gmail interface, I could not find “All Contacts”, but there is “Other Contacts” and that is where you can find and remove the old email addresses.
October 14th, 2011 at 3:31 pm
If you click on “Contacts”, under “New Contact” you will see “Most Contacted” and “Other Contacts” (in addition to “My Contacts”). If you delete the contacts you no longer need/want from those pages, you won’t see them in the autocomplete.
October 27th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
had the same problem I would send my wife an email and her old email address (before she changed he last name)would come up in the auto complete and after playing around with it for a while and almost putting my fist through my computer screen i found a method that worked for me
Go to Contacts
then on the left side there is a section that is labeled
“Most Contacted”
(there I found her old email address that was under her maiden name)
I deleted it and a few others that were annoying me and it worked
I hope this works for anyone that was having the same problem
November 6th, 2011 at 4:55 am
The reason it sill shows up in your auto fill even after deleting is because you have an email somewhere in your inbox or archives that includes that email address.
November 27th, 2011 at 3:49 pm
It seems to be solved, I deleted many old contact addresses and they are gone when I try to write an email of a deleted contact
Thanks for the solution
January 13th, 2012 at 11:12 am
Per Gmail, I read that if an autopopulating email address is not in your contacts list, you should ADD the unwanted email to your address then immediately DELETE it. I did this and it worked right away.
January 21st, 2012 at 1:58 pm
I am using an iPad and cannot locate contacts on the left.