Apple’s Mail app has a feature called Smart Addresses that’s designed to make it easier for you to see who you’re sending email messages to. Instead of displaying names and addresses in Mail’s To: field, Smart Addresses just display the name of the email recipient. One of the benefits of using Smart Addresses is the option to delete previous recipients from Mail’s collection of remembered addresses.
Smart Addresses is enabled by default, but you can make sure this feature is on by:
- Opening the Mail App.
- Selecting the Mail menu and choosing Preferences.
- Clicking the Viewing tab.
- Checking the box that says Use Smart Addresses.
When you select Smart Addresses, it changes the way Mail displays addressing information from a full named and address:
To just an addressee’s name:
Once you enter the ancient email address you should note that there’s a small arrow next to the recipient’s name. Click that menu and included in the list of menu options you’ll see an item that says, “Remove from Previous Recipients List.” Select this item and this ancient address will no longer appear when you address a new email message.
The to-don’t list
This is tedious way to have to remove old email addresses and there’s a way to bypass the tedium.
- With Mail open, select the Window menu and choose Previous Recipients.
This opens a window displaying a list of everyone you’ve sent email messages to. Take note of the first column. Anyone with a contact card next to their name is someone who is already in your Contact list, nothing in that field means they’re not. The easiest way to figure out which addresses to get rid of is to sort the list by Last Used date and delete from the top down:
- Click the Last Used column header until the oldest date appears at the top.
- Click the first address appearing in the list.
- Scroll to the last date you want to delete address for and shift-click that contact.
- Click the Remove From List button.
You should note that this will not delete any contacts from the Contacts app, it only keeps mail from remembering past recipients.
this has been taken from MacWorld, the full blog post can be found here: Goodbye to the ghosts of emails past author: Jeffery Battersby is an Apple Certified Trainer, (very) smalltime actor, and regular contributor to Macworld. He writes about Macs and more at his blog, jeffbattersby.com.