Stop Gmail auto-adding to my contacts list?

June 5, 2009 8:20 AM

Gmail, can you please stop automatically adding to my contacts list!?

How do I get Gmail to stop adding every single person I email -- even one-off crap -- to my contacts list? It bugs me because those addresses show up in the keyboard address completion when I'm adding contacts to a new email. I find myself regularly pruning the All Contacts list. Even stuff that's NOT in any contacts list will auto-complete when I'm typing in the To/CC/BCC fields.

I absolutely love Gmail, but this feature drives me nuts. I've looked through Settings, nothing. I've googled for help, no real luck.

MeFi to the rescue?

posted by wastelands to computers & internet (7 comments total)

According to discussion in the help groups, this isn't a feature that you can turn off, currently. There seems to be a bit of a movement to suggest to Google that they add this as an option.

For now, the only workaround appears to be to manually delete the contacts you don't want to keep around.
posted by chrismear at 8:30 AM on June 5

The setting that Potomac Avenue mentions only affects the Chat feature, not the autocomplete feature in the email compose form.
posted by chrismear at 8:31 AM on June 5

Yeah I just realized this wouldn't prevent it. Bummer, since the auto-adding of addresses can really screw up a gentleman's morning.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:51 AM on June 5 [1 favorite]

You can remove auto-complete entries from any web form by pressing the key while you have the offending selection highlighted in the list.
posted by Four Flavors at 1:38 PM on June 5

Hmm, the key is Delete, which got stripped out.
posted by Four Flavors at 1:39 PM on June 5

Four Flavors,
That doesn't work for me on Windows XP + Firefox 3.x :-(

chrismear,
Thanks!
posted by wastelands at 4:19 PM on June 5

Four Flavors, Gmail's address autocompletion doesn't rely on any underlying stuff in the browser - it's all done at Google's end, and clearing entries from the browser's web form entry cache doesn't affect it.
posted by flabdablet at 8:40 PM on June 5