Outlook address autocomplete
Author
Discussion

munky

Original Poster:

5,328 posts

278 months

Tuesday 11th October 2005
quotequote all
Right then you clever lot

When putting together emails in Outlook, there's a useful auto complete function that guesses the email address when you start typing it, e.g. for a mate whose email address is john.smith@blahisp.co.uk you can just type in 'john' and it completes the rest. Except, there can of course be multiple options, but the problem is that it includes any email address I've typed in in the past, not just those in the address book. It suggests email addresses I may have used once, four years ago. How do I delete these addresses, and I reiterate that these are not in my contacts list / address book.

Worse still, a friend of mine's email address has changed, so I changed it in Outlook contacts. There is no record of his old address anywhere in the contacts list. However when I start to type in his name, Outlook auto completes his old address, and doesn't suggest his new one.

What do I do? It may just be an annoyance but it's driving me nuts

Jinx

12,020 posts

290 months

Tuesday 11th October 2005
quotequote all
Have you tried highlighting the offending item and pressing the delete button? Works for me.

Oh and a link for other solutions...
www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1847175,00.asp


>> Edited by Jinx on Tuesday 11th October 09:31

munky

Original Poster:

5,328 posts

278 months

Tuesday 11th October 2005
quotequote all
Do you mean highlighting and deleting the name within the email's "To" field? Which gets rid of that address for that email, but it will constantly pop up each and every time I start typing that name again. Or do you mean there's somewhere else I can delete it?

Annoyingly, it always autocompletes a friend's old email address but never his new one, even though I've sent him a few emails by manually typing out his address. Outlook doesn't seem to 'remember' the new address, even though it's in the contacts list.

Sounds like deleting the cache may be the only way forward..

cheers

Jinx

12,020 posts

290 months

Tuesday 11th October 2005
quotequote all
Put in the first letter you should then get a list of addresses, highlight the offending one with the down cursor and press the delete button (not backspace). And robert should be your mother's brother.

Podie

46,649 posts

305 months

Tuesday 11th October 2005
quotequote all
Munky, you have to type in the address (or select it from the addy book) to get it to autocomplete in the future...

munky

Original Poster:

5,328 posts

278 months

Tuesday 11th October 2005
quotequote all
My word, I think I've got it! I was trying to highlight the offending list item with the mouse, which doesn't work (it adds the address into the email without highlighting first) so the trick is to use the cursor keys. Plus I was using backspace rather than delete.

Problem solved. Thanks jinx!

Podie - sure, but it wasn't working. That was until I (just now) got rid of the old address from autocomplete, then typed the new address into a blank email, cancelled that, then started a new one, and hey presto autocomplete now works with the new address. It just didn't seem to like autocompleting the new address while the old one was still in the list, strangely, even though I'd send half a dozen emails to the new address.

You guys should sign up as Google researchers and get paid for this stuff. Except they're not signing up any new researchers right now, but they will at some point. Have you seen it? I found it today. People ask a question and set a price they're willing to pay for the answer. http://answers.google.com/answers/browse?catid=1200