Why Does Gmail Keep Suggesting the Wrong Contact?
One of my longtime real-world friends always gets upset about “posting weird geek shit I don’t understand” on Twitter. And yet, it is he who now turns to Lifehacker – specifically the Tech 911 column – with a question about an unpleasant experience he has at Gmail.
Before I go to Twitter to discuss why it was fun that Bossk, the bounty hunter, got a sneeze and overlook mention in Solo: A Star Wars Story – I’ve always been an IG-88 fan myself – I’m more than happy devote a little time to his question. He is, after all, Walter the Giant-Storyteller : one of the few people in the San Francisco Bay Area that makes me feel tiny at 6’5.
Walter says in a loud voice:
“Dear Lifehacker!
What can I do to remove old emails that automatically pop up and fill up whenever I try to send someone an email in Google Mail? For example, when someone gets married and changes their name and email address, I start typing her name and her old email address appears. What can I do to fix this? “
My first thought, Walter, is that there’s something fun for this person with your Google contact, and this is where you’ll want to go to clean things up and get rid of those old email addresses for good. To get started, open Google Contacts – preferably in a web browser, as this will make it easier to manage your multiple entries. (While you’re there, click the Try Contact Preview link if it’s available on the left; all my suggestions are based on the new contacts interface, not the old interface.)
From there, do a quick search for the name of the person whose email address is causing you problems. If you see multiple entries for the same person in the results – and you know some of them are incorrect, or you are only going to use one to send email to that recipient – delete the rest. You can also combine multiple entries by clicking on them and selecting the icon in the upper right corner that looks liketwo arrows merging into one .
(In fact, if you click Duplicates in the left sidebar, you can clean up even more of these inconsistencies without manually searching your list.)
If there is only one entry for the person you were looking for, then it is likely that they have multiple email addresses listed on their contact … card? Profile? Thing? Whatever you call it, click the result for that person, and then click the pencil-shaped icon in the upper right corner. This will allow you to edit the specified contact and remove all email addresses (or change any names), which should fix the auto-fix issue when you send Gmail to your friend.
It’s also possible that Gmail autocomplete retrieves a contact that you didn’t enter manually, but rather a “ different ” contact that Google creates every time you correspond with a new email address. You should have noticed this when looking up a person’s name earlier, but it is also possible that you have to look for the wrong email address and delete that contact list.
While I don’t mind having a huge list of “other contacts” as it gives Gmail autocomplete a wide range of choices when I try to address an email, it annoys some people that Google automatically dumps people to this secondary list.
You can turn off this process by opening Gmail, clicking the gear icon in the upper right corner, clicking Settings, and searching for the Create Contacts to Auto-Complete option. Set it to “I’ll add contacts myself,” and autocomplete will only retrieve what is listed in Google Contacts (assuming you’ve deleted all your “other contacts”, of course).
Do you have technical issues that are keeping you awake at night? Tired of searching and troubleshooting Windows or Mac issues? Looking for advice on applications, browser extensions, or utilities that you can use to accomplish a specific task? Let us know! Let us know in the comments below, or better yet, write to david.murphy@lifehacker.com .