If you often find yourself emailing people who have contacted you recently, but you don’t need them in your contacts, you can sort by Last Used. Do this until you get to the bottom of the list. If you haven’t found any you want to add to your contacts, select those names you’ve scanned and press Delete. Scroll through the list a couple dozen names at a time. You’ll have to manually delete them from the list afterwards. To do so, select one or more names, and then click Add to Contacts. Next, you can sort by Name or Email, and scroll through the list looking to see if you are still in touch with any of these people, and want to add them to your contacts. Select all the lines with contact card icons, and then press Delete.

If none of the recipients at the top of the list show those icons, click that header again to change the sort order. This doesn’t remove them from your contacts, it just makes this list easier to work with. To start sorting the previous recipients, the first thing to do is remove all those people who are in your contacts. This icon shows that these recipients are already in your contacts. Some addresses display a small contact card icon in that column. However, there’s also a fourth column, one with no label. There are three headers: Name, Email, and Last Used.

(I’ve blurred my previous recipients you’ll see actual names and addresses in your window.) A window displays showing all the email addresses you’ve written to since you last cleared this list. To view the list of your previous recipients, open Mail, then choose Window > Previous Recipients. Here’s how to manage your previous recipients in Apple’s Mail. You may want to delete most of them, but you may also want to add some of them to your contacts. While you may have contacted several times, if you no longer need to, Apple Mail will still offer that address as an auto-complete suggestion even when you want to write to, say, īecause of this, it’s a good idea to clean out your previous recipients from time to time. These previous recipients are stored forever, or until you clean them out. It’s easy to forget complex email addresses, and, as an example, having Mail help you type can save you time. It keeps track of everyone you send messages to - whether they’re in your contacts or not - so if you ever need to send another email, it can offer to add those addresses via auto-complete. Apple + How To Manage Your Previous Recipients in Apple’s Mail

Mac mail address book