Managing Mail PREVIOUS RECIPIENTS?

i have a MBP (ML) a Mac Pro (Lion) and an iPhone.
i want to get my Mail > Window > PREVIOUS RECIPIENTS into Mac Contacts ("Address Book" in Lion) so that i can send emails from all these devices to people that are already in this database which appears to be isolated on each computer and which does not appear to exist on an iPhone when you reply to an email from there (curious if that is correct).
anyway, i am trying to add these Previous Recipients and i am about 2/3 the way through on the MBP and it appears to me that the only way to do this is to ADD all the contacts you want to the CONTACTS application and to then SORT them in the Contacts Application. for instance, if i have my brother's mailing address in Contacts and i add the EMAIL address for him i then have two Contacts for my brother and i have to manually go in and copy the email address, paste it into the original contact for him and then delete the "added" contact. i could do this by printing out all my Previous Recipients but at least THIS WAY WHEN I SEE HIS NAME IN THE PREVIOUS RECIPIENTS AT LEAST I KNOW HE HAS BEEN ADDED.
Also, from what i can tell there is no way to ADD the Previous Recipient to a GROUP so you have to create a Smart Group in Mountain Lion Contacts Application that shows all "Contacts not in Group" so that you can then assign each of the Contacts you added to a Group (a Smart Group for this does not work in Lion).
ANYWAY - assuming i do this - i believe that i am seeing that the PREVIOUS RECIPIENTS on my MAC PRO don't know that they have been added to the Contacts database is that correct? or is this just an unfortunate consequence of the fact that my Mac Pro cannot upgrade to Mountain Lion? I mean, i have a ton of Previous Recipients in this database (way more than on my MBP) but i would hate to have to add and then sort alll my Previous Recipients again if they have already been added on the MBP. you follow?
is there something that i am not understanding or is there some method to smash these two databases together or export them or something a little less tedious than this dump and sort method that i describe?
TIA
managing Mail PREVIOUS RECIPIENTS?

hi carolyn. thanks. always good to hear from you.
i think i was not very clear.
the problem i am having is that this information is important for me to have on all my devices. right now it only resides on one (mac pro) and in order to get it to the others i apparently need to manually enter the data into Contacts.
but over the long term there is an issue as to how to maintain this data.
i can get in here by doing Window > Previous Recipients and i can manually transcribe these entries one by one into Contacts and then i can delete them from within this UI. but -
what happens when i continue to use mac mail? ostensibly the entries will get repopulated when i reply to an email (unless i turn it off) and if i turn it off i would have to actually check to see if a new email was coming from a new address that i needed to add to contacts.
is there a creative way to checkmark that the previous recipient has been added to contacts so that i won't have new email addresses from this same entry added when i reply but when i go to add NEW email recipients to Contacts so that i can maintain my contact database i can only add the NEW email addresses that have not been ported to Contacts....?
you know what i mean?

Similar Messages

I delete mail previous recipients to have them repolulated again by is it mobileme?

I delete my entire mail previous recipients list to find that they have been repolulated again. What is doing this? How can I stop it happening? I want to delete forever some previous recipients. I have deleted the mail recents folder off a backup I did some time ago. Will that fix the problem?

Launch the Mail app on your Mac and go to Window>Previous Recipients.

How do YOU manage Mac Mail Previous Recipients?

i am running into a bit of a workflow issue as i try and finally conquer my contact/database. (BTW i am on Lion on the Mac Pro and ML on the MBP FWIW.)
i am trying to figure a way to either add NEW EMAIL ADDRESSES to my Mac Contacts/Address Book or to add these to my CARDSCAN database. the CardScan database i am using to organized all my business cards while my MAC CONTACTS/ADDRESS BOOK i use primarily to make phone calls.
Window > "Previous Recipients" is ostensibly a list of anyone that i have REPLIED TO. however, this database resides solely upon the computer on which you have Mac Mail installed on (i.e. i have hundreds of these on my Mac Pro and for some odd reason i only have one on my MBP). BTW another interesting question is whether there is a set of these on my iPhone or if/where it draws this information from for autocomplete in MAIL on the IPHONE.
anyway, i have a script that will add all my PREVIOUS RECIPIENTS to my MAC ADDRESS BOOK/CONTACTS into a single folder so that i can get the data from the MAC PRO into AB/CONTACTS so that both the iPhone and my Mac Pro can use this information for autocompleting email. however, this seems like a very temporary stopgap measure.
is the correct way to manage this to go one by one through each Previous Recipient, Add the one's that i want to AB/Contacts through the add functionality - at which point i can /see/ that this contact has been added to AB? if so, is there a way to do this so that my hundreds of EMAIL ADDRESSES don't totally pollute my CONTACTS on my iphone where i make phone calls? i mean, i want this data accessible to MAIL AUTOCOMPLETE but i don't really want to have to wade through all of these to get to a phone number.
also, while the script that i have will send them all to a folder this does not mark them as added to AB and it is confusing to me as to how i manage this when NEW previous recipients are in the list.
and do you have a problem with a PREVIOUS RECIPIENT email address overwriting a contact with the same name that is a PHONE NUMBER in AB/Contacts?
TIA for any help or links to good urls on this etc.

Open System Preferences > Sound > Sound Effects
Select: Play user interface sound effects
In Mail. From the Mail menu bar click Mail > Preferences then select the General tab.
Select: Play sounds for other mail actions
And make a sound selection from the New Messages Sound pop up menu.

Address Book Contacts and Mail Previous Recipients Missing/Empty/Deleted

At one point yesterday, I was happily catching up on some email using Mail. All was well. I toggled a message as Junk and went to forward it to [email protected], which was, of course, in my Previous Recipients list. Only this time it wasn't. I noticed, too, in iChat, that all of my buddies had reverted to their IM screen names from their normal Address Book-based First Name/Last Name. So I opened Address Book (which had not been running), and it was empty!
To the best of my recollection, though I have a .Mac account, there was no syncing that occurred during any of this. Worse, when I did a manual Sync to see if .Mac would restore my contacts, it didn't. My Address Book remained empty. Fortunately, it didn't propagate its emptiness to .Mac, which I checked via the Web.
When I fired up my spare iBook, everything seemed fine, and a sync there didn't blow away anything.
I found a few posts that recommended replacing my now empty AddressBook.data file with AddressBook.data.beforesave, which was large enough to seem like it might still have a lot of my contacts. I did this, and my Address Book and Previous Recipients were partially restored. The only problem is that the beforesave file was dated June 2004 and is missing all contact information over the past year and a half.
What the heck happened?! Is there any better solution out there? Any thoughts on why .Mac wasn't able to restore the file? Also, what does Previous Recipients have to do with the Address Book data files?

Is your iBook the way you want it? all of your addresses? if so maybe you could back up that database and replace the old one thats fallen to pieces. If you try that though theres no real chance I think of rebuilding that old one as far as I know. My entouage database was an all in one type of deal. when it fell apart, you lost everything. I went to the mac mail and address book after that. everything is in seperate folders with that stuff. usually I've only seen this on older running installs of OS X. Like there is a bunch of directory probs. then things gradually get goofier over time.
Thats strange it doesn't want to import contacts to your computer.
I'll ask around

Mountain Lion Mail previous recipients question

I have searched to figure out how to do this and I'm sure the answer is somewhere but I can't find it. I have edited a group in my address book and am now trying to send Mail to the edited group but Mail keeps autofilling in the old group. Thankfully I discovered this by expanding the group in my email to make sure the list of recipients was correct. It wasn't. How do I get Mail to forget the recipients of the "old" group and use the newly edited group? Thought that groups might show up in the "previous recipients" list under window>previous recipients and then I could just remove the group and start over but the group name isn't in that list. Hope this makes sense!

Well, thanks so much for the response and your attempt to help! However, when I control click the group and send email that way, it STILL populates with the old group. Ugh! For example, John Doe is in the "old group" but I have edited him and lots of others out of the group and others into the group but he still shows up in the list of recipients and the new guys are missing.
I have worked around this issue by just renaming the group but I'd really like to name it the old name because that is the name that makes sense! I've worked around the problem for now but would still like to know the answer to this issue. The crazy thing is that this happened to me this summer and I fixed it somehow but can't remember how! I thought it was by removing the group from previous recipients list. Perhaps that was the solution but the problem happened before I moved to Mountain Lion when several things changed in Mail.
Thanks again for attempting to help! Good to know the control-click trick straight from Contacts/Address Book--whatever it's now called.

Mail Previous Recipients List only shows today's recipients

In the Mail application, when I choose Window/Previous Recipients, the list shows only those recipients from emails I sent out since the last time I started up Mail application. However, when I begin to type in the To: box in a new email, a longer list of recipients shows up.
It appears the actual list and what shows up in Window/Previous Recipients don't agree.
This is a problem because some of the email addresses that show up when I begin typing in the To field are old ones that I'd like to get rid of. However, the method I used to use, going to Previous Recipients list and deleting them, won't work because they don't show up there.
This may have begun when I upgraded to Mountain Lion, though I'm not sure that is the case.
My husband is another User on the same computer, and he is not having this problem. The problem must be related to some file associated with my user being corrupted and rewritten new, or something like that. However, the only references I can find for a corrupt Previous Recipients file suggest going to Library/Application Support/Address Book and deleting a file MailRecents-v4.abcdmr. I cannot locate the file, or an Application Support folder for Address Book or Contacts.
Any help would be appreciated.

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/MailRecents-v4.abcdmr
Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select
Services ▹ Show Info
from the contextual menu.* An Info dialog should open.
Does the dialog show "You can read and write" in the Sharing & Permissions section?
In the General section, is the box labeled Locked checked?
What is the Modified date?
*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Open a TextEdit window and paste into it (command-V). Select the line you just pasted and continue as above.

IPhone Mail 'previous recipients'-can't delete

If one mistakenly tries to send a message to an e-mail address that does NOT exist, that recipient continues to show up as a future possible address when creating new e-mails. In other words, when I later create a new e-mail and start typing the person's name, in the field below where it is searching through my Contacts, it will ALSO show that previous incorrect address. On my computer, one can go into Mail>Window>'Previous Recipients', and I could delete it...however...there is no way to do that on the iPhone. Note that I have already tried to reset my iPhone by deleting the Mail account and then reactivating...and I have also tried to go to a Mac that syncs with the iPhone to go into the Mail program and delete it from 'previous Recipients', but those do not show up. Thanks. Ken

since you have a mac you can do this:
1. Quit Mail, AddressBook, and probably all other apps would be a good idea.
1. Delete the ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/mailrecents-v4.xxxxxx file
2. When deleting this file, I had to type my admin password.
3. Restart Mail
4. Go to the Previous Recipients window.
5. Select one previous recipient and delete it, or do the following to empty your list:
6. Go to Edit>Select All
7. Delete the entire list
Now when you quit Mail and then restart it, the list should stay empty.
I just searched it for you and this is what others did. I like keeping all other recipients in my phone , if I use them or not.

Mail Previous Recipients sync with AB (bug or workflow problem)

hi crampy.
i am sycing AB (my PHONE contacts) with iCloud.
i have an issue in that Window > Previous Recipients does not sync via iCloud and does not sync with AB. there is an "Add to Address Book" option in here in Lion but this requires a /manual/ adding of /each/ of the hundred plus email addresses and - in the case of email addresses with an /existing/ contact it creates a NEW contact (as far as i can get it to work). PLUS even if i do go through and manually add ALL of these to AB on my Mac Pro (and get iCloud sycing with this software) i /still/ have the problem of all of this completely cluttering up my PHONE CONTACTS or i have to go through and /manually/ MOVE these to a new category from within AB to a new category with a title like "previous recipients"...
is there a good workaround to simply get PREVIOUS RECIPIENTS to my laptop and my desktop or even to get them up on something like GMAIL or imported into a CardScan database? i mean, where is this data and what formats can i export it to if there is no SYNC ability for this data?
TIA
- jon

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/MailRecents-v4.abcdmr
Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select
Services ▹ Show Info
from the contextual menu.* An Info dialog should open.
Does the dialog show "You can read and write" in the Sharing & Permissions section?
In the General section, is the box labeled Locked checked?
What is the Modified date?
*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Open a TextEdit window and paste into it (command-V). Select the line you just pasted and continue as above.

NEW (?) Window Previous Recipients Sync in Mac Mail?

i am about to sit down and manually transcribe my Mac Mail previous recipients into Contacts because there did not seem to be any way to get this into into Mac Mail under an individual group (I don't want hundreds of email address only contacts mixed up with my phone numbers but i DO want Mail on my iphone to be able to autocomplete with these addresses...) and i just want to check that there is not an easier way to do this than doing it manually.
i have three or four hundred of these so any help would be appreciated.
workarounds such as getting this data to GMAIL would be really great as well.
thanks!

And, some progress but more strangeness. After trying all else and deciding I might as well take the time to try the nuclear option, I opted for Rebuiding. That worked, after a fashion, but not as expected:
The two messages which had originally appeared only on the iPad now also were present in Mail.app, unchanged in terms of content, time stamps, etc.
Of the two which had been only in Mail.app on the iMac, one disappeared but was discovered in Deleted Messages. The other one was still in the Inbox, but a new timestamp, about 8 or so hours earlier than the one originally showing, caused it to be displayed much further down in the list.
A Mail guru might be able to divine some clues from the above. I've noticed occasional and brief disconnects between the two platforms before, but nothing this obvious or with this duration

Previous recipients questions

i see the new previous recipients section under Window pulldown and i just want to verify that this is in fact the sum total of all my EMAIL addresses that are available to me in Mac Mail.
also does anyone know how i go about /importing/ email addresses that i have stored from previous email programs.
TIA

Hey Don Hutchinson1!
I have an article here for you that can help you manage your previous recipients list:
Mail (Mountain Lion): Manage addresses in the Previous Recipients list
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11766
Hope this helps! Thanks for coming to the Apple Support Communities!
Regards,
Braden

Previous Recipients List won't stay emptied

I have been trying to get old addresses out of my Apple Mail "Previous Recipients" list without success. I have deleted individual addresses, and even ALL addresses from the list and when I close Mail and restart everything is back in place as if I didn't do anything at all.
Interestingly enough, the last used dates on all of these addresses cover the time period from when I first got my iMac (year 2007) to the most recent address having a date of 3/22/2009.
I have an Intel-based iMac, running with OS Lion, all software is current, and I use Time Machine to back up on an external hard drive. I also have an iCloud account, and sync things with my iPad and iPhone.
Any help would be appreciated. I have looked at the other postings on this kind of problem, most of which appear to be old and not applicable.
Suggestions??

Repairing the permissions of a home folder in Lion is a complicated procedure. I don’t know of a simpler one that always works.
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the page that opens.
Drag or copy – do not type – the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:
chmod -R -N ~
The command will take a noticeable amount of time to run. When a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) appears below what you entered, it’s done. You may see a few error messages about an “invalid argument” while the command is running. You can ignore those. If you get an error message with the words “Permission denied,” enter this:
sudo !!
You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up.
Next, boot from your recovery partition by holding down the key combination command-R at startup. Release the keys when you see a gray screen with a spinning dial.
When the recovery desktop appears, select Utilities ▹ Terminal from the menu bar.
In the Terminal window, enter “resetpassword” (without the quotes) and press return. A Reset Password window opens.
Select your boot volume if not already selected.
Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.
Under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click the Reset button.
Select  ▹ Restart from the menu bar.

Previous Recipients in Mail.app ought to have automatic management option

Most non-power users do not understand how to use Previous Recipients in Mail.app and there is so much more Apple could do to make that a more useful tool.
When someone changes their email address, Previous Recipients does not automatically update it; so if you don't manually remove the old address, the autofill function will continue to suggest the old address -- this is the source of a huge amount of accidentally misdirected emails.
I wish Apple would offer an option which the user can turn on to automatically offer to delete nonconforming Previous Recipients entries whenever the user changes an address in the Contacts application.
Ideally the preference would have three options: "don't do anything", "ask if nonconforming emails should be removed" and "automatically remove nonconforming emails when I change an email address in Contacts"

Use the +Provide Mail Feedback+ option in the Mail menu of Mail.
We're just users here helping other users with problems. Apple doesn't collect suggestions (or much of anything else) here.

Managing Previous Recipients (doesn't it over-write existing?)

i have also posted this in the Lion forum as i am stuck on lion on the mac pro even though i went ahead and upgraded to ML on the MBP before realizing this.
i had a couple of problems the last time i went into Mac Mail and tried to add my Previous Recipients to my Address Book/Contacts so that i can use this data to AUTOCOMPLETE emails on my MBP, Mac Pro and my iPhone. right now these databases reside solely on the computer that Mail is installed upon so ostensibly adding them manually to AB/Contacts allows you to sync for Autocomplete.
1. do you have problems with a Previous Recipeint named "John Smith" overwriting a Contact "John Smith" so that now in AB/Contacts you have just an email address instead of the phone number (which i need to make calls)?
2. is there a way to add these Previous Recipients so that they go into a /specific/ group? i have a ton of groups and currently with the switch to iCloud there is apparently no longer a way to SORT BY UNGROUPED which means i have a ton of contacts that only reside in ALL CONTACTS and this makes life very difficult for finding things.
3. do you basically maintain the link of these Previous Recipients by going into Previous Recipients on your various machines from time to time and checking to see what has been added to this list but has not been added to AB/Contacts? and then do you manually add these?
4. is there such a thing as Previous Recipients on my iPhone? i mean, if i reply to a VIP on my iPhone - would i think have to wait until i also replied to his/her email on one of my computers before i had a chance to see that this was a Previous Recipient that had to be added to my contact database?
TIA for any help or link to url's on this.
also a shout out to the mac developer crew. i would love to see a way to see globally how all my contacts are or are not sorted into GROUPS. at the very least it would be great to see the ones not in groups so i can make sure everything can be added to the group.
and finally, i am not a fan of the new UI for Contacts on the iPhone in iOS6. this checkmark business where i have to go through and uncheck All Contacts and then check the individual group(s) i want to see is a major pain from the previous implementation which i don't remember but which i never had a problem with. does anyone know how to manage 20+ groups without contantly clicking on and off things in this UI on the iPhone these days...?

hi carolyn. thanks. always good to hear from you.
i think i was not very clear.
the problem i am having is that this information is important for me to have on all my devices. right now it only resides on one (mac pro) and in order to get it to the others i apparently need to manually enter the data into Contacts.
but over the long term there is an issue as to how to maintain this data.
i can get in here by doing Window > Previous Recipients and i can manually transcribe these entries one by one into Contacts and then i can delete them from within this UI. but -
what happens when i continue to use mac mail? ostensibly the entries will get repopulated when i reply to an email (unless i turn it off) and if i turn it off i would have to actually check to see if a new email was coming from a new address that i needed to add to contacts.
is there a creative way to checkmark that the previous recipient has been added to contacts so that i won't have new email addresses from this same entry added when i reply but when i go to add NEW email recipients to Contacts so that i can maintain my contact database i can only add the NEW email addresses that have not been ported to Contacts....?
you know what i mean?

How can I delete an auto complete address in Mail that is not in Previouse Recipients?

Hello. I have an e-mail address that comes up in auto complete in my e-mail when sending. It is NOT in previous recipients and
I am unable to delete it. Hope someone can help me with it. Thanks

Have found the answer on Apple discussion and was able to delete it in my Address Book.

How to delete the Previous Recipients list in iPhone 3G Mail

I would like to delete the list of previous recipients in my iPhone 3G Mail so that when I search it only shows addresses in my Contacts, not every single random address I may have used.
I know how to do this in Mail on my desktop, and I tried the option of replacing the Mail info on the iPhone with the info from the desktop, but it didn't work.
Anyone knows how to do this?

sanjinzvonic,
In my expeirence, the only way to do this is to restore your iPhone, setting it up as a new phone. You can try resetting all settings prior to this to see if that does it as well.
To reset all settings, navigate to Settings > General > Reset.
Backing Up, updating, and restoring your iPhone and iPod touch software
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414
Hope this helps,
Raleigh

Managing Mail PREVIOUS RECIPIENTS?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for