Jan 27, 2024 • Filed to: Recover Emails • Proven solutions
If you are a Gmail user, then you might have stumbled upon a situation in which you wish to delete an email address from Gmail too. For instance, Gmail would automatically fill the recipient’s contact, letting you mistakenly send an email to the wrong person at times. That’s why sometimes users wish to customize this feature and delete an email address from Gmail. To help you, I have come up with this guide on how to delete old email addresses in Gmail with other tips to manage your account.
Before you learn how to delete email addresses from Gmail auto-complete, it is important to know how email addresses are saved in Gmail.
That is, as soon as you have contacted the other user, Gmail will save the email address. Now, whenever you write a new email, Gmail will automatically fill in the address if it would match the initial letters.
For instance, let’s suppose that I have sent an email to abc@xyz.com in the past. Later, whenever I would compose a new email and would write “a” in the “To” field, Google will automatically suggest this email id.
If you want to manage your Gmail account, then you can use its inbuilt features to create folders and filters of all kinds.
In Gmail, folders are known as “Labels” that can be accessed from the sidebar. To create a new label in your Gmail account, you simply need to log-in to your account. Afterward, select any email that you wish to move and right-click. From the context menu, click on “Label as” and choose to create a new label.
That’s it! You can now enter details to create a new label for your Gmail account. If you want, you can easily move any email to the new label. Simply select and right-click the email and choose to move it to the existing label.
Apart from labels, you can also create a filter to perform any operation on bulk emails. For this, you can just go to your Gmail account, click on the search bar at the top, and select the Advanced Search option.
This will let you create a new filter based on parameters like keywords, contacts, date of the emails, size of the mails, and so on. Let’s say you have to select all emails sent by a particular person. You can just enter their email address here to create a new filter. Later, you can set a particular task for the filter (like automatically deleting all emails in it).
You have added an unwanted email address to your Google Contacts and now you wish to get rid of it? Well, you can easily learn how to delete old email addresses in Gmail by visiting your Google Contacts. This is because all the saved email addresses from your Gmail are ideally stored in your Google Contacts account.
I had a similar doubt a while back when I wanted to know how do I delete an email address from Gmail’s memory. Surprisingly, the solution is pretty easy and won’t need any technical hassle. To learn how to delete email addresses from Gmail auto-complete, follow these steps:
Step 1: Go to your Google Contacts
At first, you can just visit your Google Contacts dashboard. For this, you can directly go to the Google Contacts website (contacts.google.com) and log-in to your account.
Alternatively, you can first go to your Gmail dashboard and click on the grid icon from the top. Now, from the list of the supported Google services, just click on the “Contacts” option.
Step 2: Find the Contacts you wish to remove from Gmail
As the interface of Google Contacts would be launched, you can view a detailed list of all the saved Gmail contacts. You can go to any existing category on the sidebar to look for a contact to delete. Besides that, you can also type their name on the search bar at the top to find any specific contact.
Step 3: Delete any email address from Gmail
Once you find the contacts to delete, just select them by clicking on the checkbox at the left. You can select as many contacts as you wish to delete from your Gmail here.
After selecting the contacts to delete, you can click on the three-dot (hamburger) icon from the toolbar. This will present options to print, hide, export, or delete the selected contacts. Simply click on the “Delete” option here to remove the selected contacts.
That’s it! In the end, Google will display a confirmation prompt before deleting your contacts permanently. Just click on the “Delete” button again to successfully remove the selected contacts from your Gmail account.
As you can see, learning how to delete an email address from the Gmail address book is pretty easy. Though, if you want, you can simply disable the auto-complete feature for your contacts in Gmail as well. In this way, you can still keep all your contacts saved and avoid the mistake of sending emails to the wrong person.
To learn how to delete email addresses from Gmail auto-complete, you can disable the feature in the following way:
Step 1: Go to your Gmail Account Settings
To begin with, just go to your Gmail account on any browser and click on the gear icon at the top-right corner. From here, you can choose to visit all Gmail settings.
Step 2: Disable the Auto-complete option in Gmail
Now, just go to the “General” tab on Gmail settings (which would be opened by default) and look for the “Create contacts for auto-complete” option. If the feature is set to the automatic addition of contacts, then disable it and enable the “I’ll add contacts myself” option.
Step 3: Save your Gmail Settings
That’s it! Once you have disabled the auto-complete option, scroll down, and choose to save the changes you have made. Now, instead of automatically saving contacts in your Gmail account, you would have to do it manually.
There you go! I’m sure that after reading this post, you can easily learn how to delete old email addresses in Gmail to keep your inbox organized. To make things easier for you, I have also included other tips to manage your Gmail account. Go ahead and try some of these tips or share this guide with others to teach them how to delete any email address from Gmail or disable its auto-complete feature in a jiffy.
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Amy Dennis
staff Editor