Gmail – Deleting previous recipients from Gmail

gmail

Gmail, seems to maintain a log of email addresses I've responded to. Addresses in this list appear whenever typing in an address in the To: field OR when exporting the Gmail contacts to share with another service. These are often addresses to support or general contact addresses from websites.There are so many of these in my history that it makes it difficult to scan and find addresses I am looking for. The Gmail help facility apparently treats the word "ALL" as the 100 most recently emailed. I want to go through this list and purge these once used email addresses and have a more salient Gmail address book.

Best Answer

First, you should go into Settings in the General tab and change the value for "Create contacts for auto-complete:" from "When I send a message to a new person, add them to Other Contacts so that I can auto-complete to them next time" to "I'll add contacts myself".

Then, in your Contacts, find "Other Contacts".

In the Contacts Preview, that can be found under "More". (This actually brings you back the the "Old Contacts" app.)

In the "Old Contacts", you can find a link for "Other Contacts" in the left-hand menu, probably under "Most Contacted". There you'll find all of the contacts Gmail has automatically added for you. "Select All" and delete them. You may need to do this for multiple pages.