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Why can't I turn off the "add to contacts, anyone I reply to" feature?
When you send/reply to an email, Gmail automatically adds an entry to your "contacts". While I'm sure this is useful to some it is very annoying for me to wade through contact info I know I don't want or need. (i.e. job-448893337@craigslist.org is not something I want to save, despite having sent an email via gmail)
Can you add an option (like most desktop apps have) to disable this feature?
Can you add an option (like most desktop apps have) to disable this feature?
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?So I'm not sure you're going to like this answer, but here's what I found in the Gmail Help section:
"At present, Gmail doesn't allow you to disable the automatic addition contacts to your Contacts list. However, it's easy to delete contacts from your list. Here's how:
1. Click Contacts on the left side of any Gmail page.
2. Check the box next to the entry you would like to delete.
3. Click Delete at the top of the page.
4. Click OK."
Which I think is pretty lame. Maybe someone else out there knows of a work-around? Or maybe I'm missing something?
I’m slightly annoyed now. But I still love Gmail.
1 person says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Bummer. Yeah, I usually go through my list every once in a while to purge random contacts but I waited too long this time and now it's loaded. :( I wonder how hard it would be for them to label the contacts as auto add so I could select them all at once and delete? Thanks for the official info. I'm new to this site and so far it's pretty cool!
I’m bummed but still think Gmail is cool.
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Inappropriate?We have some power Gmail users on our team here so I'm checking with them to see if they know any work-arounds for this. And if there aren't any, Google really needs to get on adding the ability to have more control over who / what gets added to your Contacts. Seems pretty basic to me.
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Inappropriate?I suggest this workaround:
Add a new group, call it "MyContacts" or something.
Now add all the contacts you care about to this MyContacts group. Now whenever you want to manually add a contact, be sure to add it to MyContacts. This group can now be exported separately, and you can delete/add contacts to it.
If you now have many auto added contacts you want to get rid of, you can now export MyContacts, delete the entire addressbook, and re-import just MyContacts.
Hope this helps :)
mfyahya
1 person says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?I'd like to add that this auto-add "feature" is even more irritating when you would like to sync your Gmail contacts with your Apple Address Book. Now I've got all of those Craigslist email addresses in two places. w00t?
I’m frustrated
1 Comment Add a comment
This answers the question
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Yeah, that's extra annoying. -
Inappropriate?Would really like to see this feature implemented. I have over 200 contacts in Google that I need to keep, so every time a contact auto-adds it takes awhile to find it and delete it.
