I frequently use Mail’s autofill feature to address emails to people; it saves me the hassle of having to type in the recipient’s full email address or me having to find their name in my address book (in lower-case to differentiate the actual listing of people from the Address Book application itself). (It also highlights one of the many reasons why I prefer actual mail clients to web-based mail in all its forms, but that’s another blog entry altogether.) Also I often neglect to add people’s email addresses to my address book, mostly out of sheer laziness. I suck, don’t I?

However, in time the autofill list can become cluttered with names of people I’ve never heard of, mostly thanks to spammers. Observe:

For the past few days I’ve been looking for a way to remove the extraneous names in the autofill list because I have accidentally addressed a number of emails to spam email addresses recently. Why has this become a problem only recently? I have no idea.

With the help of Google, however, I found a little hidden gem of a Mail feature that Macworld pointed out in an article published in early 2006 entitled Mac tune-up: 34 software speedups. The Macworld article pointed me in the general direction of the “Previous Recipients” window as the means to removing these useless email addresses. Sweet. Macworld explains that the Previous Recipients window, accessible via the Window menu, allows you to delete any autofill names you don’t want. The Previous Recipients window has a few other tricks up its sleeve, though.

Let’s take a quick peek at the Previous Recipients window, shall we?

The Previous Recipients window. Look at all the spammers!

Removing a name from the list is pretty easy; select the name(s) and click “Remove From List.” For whatever reason, pressing the delete key does not remove the name. Before we go on, let’s look at the list itself. Beyond the expected name and email columns, Apple thoughtfully added two other columns, the unnamed column on the far left, and the “Last Used” column. The contents of the nameless far left column indicate whether or not someone is currently listed in your address book; in the following image, for example, Deep Thought staffer Joseph is listed in my address book, as denoted by the small business card icon:

Joseph is in my address book.

Two cards for Arden!

To add someone in the Previous Recipients list to your address book, simply select the name(s) you wish to add and click “Add to Address Book.” The downside to this, however, is that if you already have an individual listed in your address book and want to add a second email address for that person to the existing address book card (e.g. in the case of Joseph in the above screenshot), you are out of luck, as the “Add to Address Book” button will add a duplicate card with the new email address. That said, Address Book does have a “Merge cards” feature (Cards menu).

The “Last Used” column shows, well, the last date which you sent an email to a particular address. I know, I’m Captain Obvious. This is useful, for example, when discerning which email address for a particular person is current and which one is outdated. Each column are sortable in ascending and descending order, just like in the Finder. Just click the column header to sort by that particular attribute. Lastly, the search field allows you to search by either name or email address, but does not allow you to search by Last Used date.

Okay, so this is nothing groundbreaking, but I can only hope that I’ve added a little bit of sanity to your email experience.