Comments on: Cleaning up Mail’s Previous Recipients List

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:53:16 +0000

Me too :)

By: ArAgost

ArAgost — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 23:09:31 +0000

Thank you… small things like this can make me happy :)

By: Michael Houghton

Michael Houghton — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:05:17 +0000

Ahh… that ‘splains some of the others. :)

By: y011

y011 — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 11:15:18 +0000

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.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 23:07:12 +0000

Michael – I stand corrected! Thanks for pointing out those links. That will teach me to trust an Apple technote :)

By: MacStansbury

MacStansbury — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 17:48:07 +0000

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.

By: Michael Houghton

Michael Houghton — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 16:37:14 +0000

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)

By: Michael Houghton

Michael Houghton — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 16:35:34 +0000

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.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:17:09 +0000

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

By: Michael Houghton

Michael Houghton — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 13:55:47 +0000

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.