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MacMail Previous Recipients isn't working - adds spam addresses that I don't write to, can't rebuild the list and mine was somehow restarted in October, with nothing before that.
 

Cory Cooper

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Hello.

I just checked mine, and it is the same as yours - adds addresses that I haven't emailed, and only goes back to 10/11/19. I believe that it only keeps the last three months, so that the list doesn't get too large to process. You can manually remove entires, but it will add new ones as you go.

Any email addresses that you want to make sure are available for AutoFill should be entered in your Contacts app.

Hope that helps,

C
 
Joined
Oct 30, 2019
Messages
21
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Hello.

I just checked mine, and it is the same as yours - adds addresses that I haven't emailed, and only goes back to 10/11/19. I believe that it only keeps the last three months, so that the list doesn't get too large to process. You can manually remove entires, but it will add new ones as you go.

Any email addresses that you want to make sure are available for AutoFill should be entered in your Contacts app.

Hope that helps,

C
Hmm. Thanks for your input. On your hypothesis, I just picked at random an old name from my mac contact app (someone I haven't mailed in over a year) and searched the previous recipients list (by name and by email address) and this person was not there. So, I think the conditions for being in previous recipients must be even more restricted than you suggest. Perhaps even being in contacts doesn't ensure being in PR list. Note, however, that when I began to address an email to this person, the email address popped up correctly, but apparently the app was using the contacts directly to do this, rather than the PR list. Note #2, it seems that the email return addresses of some incoming emails are place in PR, despite it seeming very unlikely that I have ever actually sent mail to them or put them in Contacts. Like Mail Delivery "Mail Delivery Subsystem", which I could identify as a bounce message which arrived on 1/3/20 (the date shown in PR), and which message I had filed for my records! So maybe it counts filing the message as the same as sending it? Note #3: I can also suggest from my recent experience that people who appear in an outgoing email in a list of addresses are NOT entered in Previous Recipients!! Woops, not an exhaustive test! Test a - I checked recipients of an email with a pretty long list and those were not in PR; however, a test mail sent with a list of two in the copy line did put them in the PR list. So far, inconclusive...
 

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