PSA: Deleting Contacts from Gmail Auto-Complete

The way Gmail remembers email addresses you have replied to, even if you did not actually add that person to your Contacts, is a standard, convenient feature of email clients. But the way Gmail NEVER forgets an address is really a problem, when one of your correspondents changes their email address. It is all to easy to take what the auto-complete offers, and send to an old email address.

After one too many social mishaps, I took the initiative to figure out how to solve this problem. The solution turns out to be pretty straightforward, but not easy to find--I came across a few less-effective approaches, before I found this one.

The key to the solution is knowing that Google exposes the ad-hoc contacts within an automatically populated "OTHER" group, within the Contacts app. So the solution boils down to--delete all of the OTHER contacts.

Here is the step-by-step:

1. Open Google Contacts (this will work much better with a computer & browser than mobile device).
2. Scroll and select the OTHER group of Contacts.
3. See years/decades worth of old email addresses & contact names.
4. Spend as much time as you like scrolling down memory lane.
5. When ready, start selecting for deletion.

Unfortunately, there is no SELECT ALL button. The best work-around is to click the first contact, scroll down to the last contact, and shift-click. That will select everything in between first and last.

Also in my experience, the deletion is really slow (maybe that is why no SELECT ALL button!), so be patient.

(I wouldn't worry too much that you will lose some valuable contact. If you really do need to find contact info for the lawn guy you last emailed 8 years ago, you can always just search your email. But if you are worried, you could do some form of export or Google Takeout first.)

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This is begging for some intelligence on Google's part. Short of that, it would help if the list told you when a contact was last used. Better yet, offer to clean up anything older than X months. And instead of a hard-delete, place it in an archive--where the archive is walled-off from showing up in auto-complete.

It would also be nice to be able to delete/archive a given contact on-the-fly. E.g., when you type "smit..." and Smitty Johnson that you last emailed 12 years ago appears, have an option to click an expansion menu and insta-delete that one. I believe Outlook works this way.