Have you ever noticed how, in Apple’s Mail program, when you start typing in an address it will try to guess which address you want, based on the first couple of letters you type? It’s a very handy feature. I can just start typing “mom…” and it pops up with the rest of my mother’s e-mail address. Fantastic! (She wishes I’d type that a little more often, but that’s another story.)
But sometimes it brings up an address that doesn’t work or is incomplete. So when you hit send you get an error message. Or worse, it just silently disappears into the ether.
So how can you get Mail to stop remembering addresses that are wrong? We’ll be going into exactly that in this post.
The Mail application in OS X knows about three different sources for e-mail addresses. The most obvious source is the actual Address Book.
Address Book
Here, you can put all sorts of good information about folks, not just their e-mail. For example, I put people’s photo, their birthday, their spouse’s name, phone numbers, etc. I also keep notes on some folks, so I know their extension, or the last thing we talked about that I need to remember when I call them next. It’s an amazingly useful application that deserves its own post. I really think most people under-utilize this application the most.
And once it’s in Address Book, many different applications in Mac OS X can use it. For example, iCal can pull out the birthday info from my address book and automatically create a calendar from it. iChat knows all about the screen names I’ve got stored, and even pulls up the photo I have stored when I chat with someone. And, of course, it all syncs just swimmingly with my iPhone.
Mail uses this as a source for addresses, but Mail doesn’t let you edit the source. It just uses it “read only”. So to edit an address book entry, you have to open the actual Address Book application, which is different from the Mail application. Take a look in your Dock, where it lives by default. If it’s not there, check out your Applications folder.
LDAP Directory
The second place that Mail can get address information is from a “Directory”. Most folks don’t have this set up, but for those that do it can be pretty handy. A directory is basically an electronic phone book. (The official term is “LDAP directory”.) Companies and organizations typically set up one so they can all use a common set of contacts.
The best example I’ve seen is the UW-Madison’s setup. If you hook Address Book into the UW’s LDAP directory, you can search for the e-mail and campus phone number of any UW person. Of course, if you’re not affiliated with the UW, then the UW’s LDAP directory wont’ be of much use.
Previous Recipients
The last place that Mail looks for addresses is in its own history. It keeps a list of all the people you’ve sent mail to. The idea is that if you’ve sent mail to them once, you’ll probably want to do it again. Why not make it easier the second time?
But I’m a bad typist and sometimes I manage to type in the wrong address the first time. For example, “momm@…” instead of “mom@…” and Mail helpfully remembers that incorrect address. Now every time I start typing “mom…” this wrong address shows up, and sometimes I don’t notice and send the message to the wrong address.
As it turns out, you can very easily modify Mail’s list of saved addresses. In Mail, go to the “Window” menu and choose “Previous Recipients”. There you’ll see a list off all the addresses that Mail has stored. You will also see a little icon for the folks that are listed in your Address Book also.
From here, you have the option of removing entries that are old or incorrect. If there’s someone you really talk to a lot, you can also add them to the Address Book with the button provided. I like to sort the list by date and throw out any that I haven’t used in the last two years or so. The best part of this little window is the search field. Using the example above, I can search for “momm” to narrow down that list and then delete the incorrect entry.
The only problem is now I don’t have an excuse for why I haven’t e-mailed my mother. Hopefully Apple’s hard at work on this one.
