Removing old email addresses from iPhone mail

Have you ever had the problem in the mail app on the iPhone that when you start to type a person’s name all their past (obsolete) email addresses come up! Even after you have deleted someone from  your  ‘Contacts’ they can appear in the ‘To’ field of Mail app when you are writing a new email.  This is because the mail app remembers  the email address of anyone that you have sent an email to . This is very handy if you have someone  that you want to send an email to who is not in your contacts.  But it can get annoying when someone’s old disused email address keeps appearing instead of the new one.

I have already written about how to solve this  problem on the desktop version of mail app in OS X  here.

How do you solve the problem on the iPhone though?  Here’s how.

When you create a ‘New Message’ on the iPhone and start typing in the ‘To:’ field, a list of email addresses appear.

Some of these are coming from your ‘Contacts’ app and some of them are coming from the ‘Mail’ app itself. The way to tell where they are coming from is to see if they have a little blue ‘ i’  next to them.

If they come from your ‘contacts’ list they do not have a little blue ‘i’  next to them. If they come from ‘Mail’ app  then they have a little ‘i’ next to them.

So, if someone does not have the little ‘i’ to them,  to get rid of them you  need to go into the ‘contacts’ app and search for their email address. Then select ‘edit’ for that that contact and delete their email address. It will no longer appear in the ‘To:’ field when you are typing a new email.

If they do have a little e’i’ then it’s easy to get rid of them! To get rid of someone’s email address that is not in your ‘contacts’  you simply need to press the little blue ‘i’ and then press ‘remove from Recents’

Simply click ‘Remove from Recents’ and their email address will stop appearing in future emails.

‘Remove From Recents’ is the equivalent of ‘Remove previous recipient’ on OSX. It will remove their email address from mail’s memory so that their email address is not suggested again. (Unless you send or receive another email to or from them – then you’ll have to remove them again.)