How do I remove invalid email addresses from autofill?
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. If you're not getting Confident Computing in your inbox
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One of the questions I get frequently is somebody composing an email and they start typing an
email address and all of a sudden there's an invalid one, or one that they don't expect, or
something is just wrong about the suggestions that are being made by their email interface.
The problem here is that these suggestions can come from several different places.
I'm going to show you how to clear up one of them, and tell you about the other two.
First, the most common culprit? It's your browser trying to be helpful.
So here we are in Microsoft Edge and I'm going to use it as my example.
This applies to all browsers, including Chrome and Firefox and others. The problem is that
the browser is trying to be helpful and by being helpful I mean it says.
Oh, this is a form field. It's just a place that you can type something onto a webpage.
You've been here before I remembered what you typed before. Let me suggest what you typed
before in case you want to type it again. That can get in the way if you, for example
mistyped an email address. So I'm going to type control, shift delete to bring up what
we normally would use to clear the browser cache. I'm going to uncheck everything except for one.
And you have to Scroll down in this list and it's this "autofill form fields
auto fill form data, including forms and cards." This is where the browser keeps its
recommendations. It's remembering of what you've typed into various fields before
so that it can suggest them to you again the next time you're typing in that same field.
This is responsible I'd say for at least half of these situations where there's something
unexpected that comes up as a suggestion when you're typing, not just into email,
but almost any form. So go ahead and say all time, clearing the autofill form data and clearing out
and we're done. Now all of a sudden you're not going to get those suggestions from your browser.
Now that's only one of the places that these suggestions can come from. The two others are a
little bit more specific to the email interface that you happen to be using, but they apply to
both your email, if you're using web interfaces, and if you're using a dedicated email program.
The first? Your address book. If there's something in your address book that is similar to what
you're typing as you type into a two or CC or BCC line, many email programs will suggest things.
Suggest them from your address book. So the thing to do of course, is to go look
at your address book. Look for the entry that you want to get rid of from the suggestions
and remove it from your address book, if you don't want to see that suggestion ever again,
just remove it from the address book. Now, of course, if it's in your address book,
it's probably there for a reason. It's probably there because you wanted
somebody in your address book or contacts. The thing that happens, the thing that surprises
a lot of people is that many email programs and websites automatically add to your address book.
So look for an option in the options for your email interface, be it a programmer or website
that says " automatically add email addresses that I receive or that I send to
to my address book." Turn that off. The problem is that if you mistype
an email address and you hit send, your email program thinks you've sent to it,
and therefore they had this bad email address to your contacts. We don't want that.
You want your contacts or your address book to be managed by you,
not by automatically adding all of these random entries, be they legitimate or otherwise.
The other approach is that many email programs specifically will start making suggestions,
even if they're not in your contacts. Even if they're not part of the browser interface
and there's no obvious way to remove them, because there is no place that the
user interface exposes this collection of things that your email program has remembered for you.
The good news here is very simple. You can, when a suggestion is made, use the arrow keys
to go up and down in the suggested list, and when the erroneous suggestion is highlighted,
hit the delete key that will nine times out of ten remove that entry from the list of suggestions
that your email program is keeping for you. Very simple, but again, if it's in your contacts,
you'll want to remove it from your contacts. And if you're in your browser, you'll
want to make sure that it's autofill suggestions have been cleared as well.
Finally, then, if it's still suggesting something that you don't want suggested.
Just use the up and down arrow keys to highlight that bad suggestion and hit delete.
Hopefully that was helpful. If you have comments or questions or you want to see related links,
visit askleo.com/13438. I'm Leo Notenboom. This is askleo.com.