Q and A: How do I get old email addresses out of Mail?

Q. I have a client that changed their email address. I updated their address book card on my Mac but Mail keeps trying to auto-populate their old email address. I’ve searched everywhere and I’m positive I don’t have any duplicate address book entries for them. I just need this to go away. Help!
Tony T.

A. Tony, this is actually pretty easy to do in Mail. From within the app, go up to your Window drop down menu and select Previous Recipients.

This will pop up a window that contains a list of all the people you’ve sent emails to. While there is a search box in this window, keep in mind that you can’t search by domain name, which in some cases can be a bummer. It will, however, let you search by first name, last name or even the first part of the email address.

Bonus tip: For those of you using Entourage, this process is a bit more complicated. The bad email address has to be added as a contact, then you delete the contact. They finally made it really easy in Outlook 2011 where they put a little x symbol next to the cached email address. You just click the x and it’s gone.

Did this help you out? Let us know in the comments. If you have a Mac question that you would like answered, please email ask@macgasm.net

Apple Systems Admin for mac-fusion, which is just a fancy name for a tech. For the last 12 years I've been fixing Macs and we specialize in helping businesses run their company on a Mac. If you like Mac tweets, follow me on Twitter.