Cleaning up Mail’s Previous Recipients List
Mail keeps a list of all the email addresses for people you have emailed.
It doesn’t discriminate. Even the ones you typed in incorrectly get stored and will pop up in Mail’s auto-complete drop-down menu for ever after. That’s annoying and it slows you down.
It’s Spring in Australia, so I’ve been spring cleaning Mail (See “Spring cleaning to regain disk space”).
Cleaning out the Previous Recipients list is part of the drill. It’s a good idea to do this from time to time, not only to clean out the duds, but also because:
- Apple Mail’s Junk Filter will not mark an email as junk if it comes from an address in your Previous Recipients list. Along with the Address Book, it functions as a de facto “white list”. Keeping it up to date helps Mail to find junk better
- It’s quite fun to go through the list and wonder who all these people are that you have emailed at least once.
You can find it under the Windows menu.
It presents you with a list of the names, email addresses and the date of the last email sent:
I cleaned out 53 addresses this time around. I’m not sure if it actually speeds Mail up, but it feels faster and the annoying mistakes no longer appear in the drop-down list for me to wade through.
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Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, Junk, mail.app, Previous Recipients, Productivity, spring cleaning
October 26th, 2006 at 11:55 pm
Is it always people you’ve emailed at least once? It looks to me like a list of people who have been recipients of emails you have received as well.
Mine has plenty of people I know I’ve never mailed myself.
October 27th, 2006 at 12:17 am
No, I think it is just the To and Cc fields of your own outgoing emails.
That’s how it reads from the horse’s mouth:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mail/2.0/en/ml1025.html
October 27th, 2006 at 2:35 am
I definitely have emails in there from users I have never emailed, or CC’d. Some of them look like I might have clicked ‘not spam’ on them, so I just checked this out, and indeed it is the case.
http://www.it.iastate.edu/pub/mag345/mag345.html
‘Periodically, you should check the Junk folder to see if any legitimate messages have been misfiled. If there are, highlight them and click the “Not Junk” button. The messages will be returned to the Inbox and Mail will learn that messages like those are not junk. In addition, the sender of the message will be added to your Previous Recipients list and future messages from that address will not be marked as Junk.’
http://www.it.iastate.edu/pub/mag345/mag345.html
‘Surprisingly, though, marking a message as Not Junk also adds the message’s Sender to your Previous Recipients list! This guarantees that no message from that sender will be marked as spam in the future (assuming you use the default settings), which may or may not be what you want. This is just one of many surprises I encountered with the design of the Previous Recipients list.’
So, the ‘previous recipients’ list is actually a whitelist, by default.
October 27th, 2006 at 2:37 am
Doh – second link should have been:
http://db.tidbits.com/article/07677
(My #1 safari annoyance, incidentally: URL doesn’t copy to clipboard until page has finished loading)
October 27th, 2006 at 3:48 am
I have a fairly huge bunch of websites I get WordPress and Movable Type replies in email, so I get tons of email replies.
This morning I deleted over 300. I do this every 5 or 6 months.
October 27th, 2006 at 9:07 am
Michael – I stand corrected! Thanks for pointing out those links. That will teach me to trust an Apple technote :)
October 27th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
Imports also add to Previous Recipients list. I imported a bunch of old mailboxes from history (pine mbox-format files). I found that these were also parsed for previous recipient list inclusion. A sort by date easily identified these old, likely stale email addresses. The date next to their entry in the recipient list indicates the date they were added (same as date I imported these). Easy to spot. So if you’ve imported some email (and I imagine this applies to email imported from other email programs like Entourage, etc) you may be sullying your list as well.
October 27th, 2006 at 10:05 pm
Ahh… that ‘splains some of the others. :)
October 28th, 2006 at 9:09 am
Thank you… small things like this can make me happy :)
October 28th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Me too :)