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:

1. 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
2. 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. mail.app, apple mail, previous recipients, spring cleaning, productivity, tips, junk

When I switched to Macs just over two years ago, hardened Mac-heads told me that I would never have to worry again about all the maintenance tasks that sucked up my time and energy on the PC. “Hey, it all just works”, they grinned.

How wrong was that!

Joe Kissell has written an ebook in the Take Control series that outlines the essential steps for keeping your Mac in good shape.

What’s the point of tricking out Mail.app with all the bling-bling addons and plugins you can find on this site, if the computer that runs the whole show is limping along at half-efficiency underneath?

Joe sets out the maintenance jobs you need to perform, divided into suggested daily, weekly, monthly and yearly tasks. He covers everything from daily backups to weekly Desktop spring-cleaning, how and when to “Exercise” your notebook battery for best performance, to using Snippet or Information Managers to organise all those little files that clutter up your Mac and to the importance of a yearly “de-dust” of your Mac.

He also presents frequent lists of useful apps, web sites and resources, making the book a treasure trove of tips.

It only took me three months with my (then) new PowerBook to trash Mail.app by plugin abuse and bring Panther to its knees.

You may be kinder to your Mac and so avoid the need to do these things for longer. But whether it is three months or a year, Joe’s advice is good advice:

maintaining your Mac—like maintaining your teeth, your car, your health, or your home—is a good habit whose rewards are having fewer problems later on and being able to recover more easily from problems that do arise. You can sometimes get away without doing any maintenance for a few months or perhaps much longer, but you risk losing data, wasting time, and having to spend a great deal of money repairing or replacing your computer.

For only USD 10, you can get hold of one of the best collections of good habits going around.

I’ll be buying a copy for my mother-in-law. If it cuts her tech support calls in half, it will be worth its weight in gold.

You can check it out on Take Control’s web site .take control, joe kissell, tips, spring cleaning, maintenance, mail.app, prevention is the best medicine