Reader Helen Pressel is annoyed by Mail’s insistence on auto-completing incorrect addresses. She writes:
I have an iMac running OS X 10.2.8. On my address book I have entered some incorrect email addresses. Every time I enter the first couple of letters of the address, all these unwanted addresses come up. Since they have not been entered on a card, I can’t find them to delete them. How can I delete all these wrong email addresses that keep coming up on my screen?
These entries are added to Mail’s cache when you create an email message and type in what turns out to be an incorrect address. To remove them in the version of Mail that shipped with OS X 10.2.8, select Window > Address History, locate the incorrect address in the resulting Address History window, and click Remove From History.
In Tiger’s version of Mail, this command’s name is Previous Recipients, but works the same way. Additionally, in the Panther and Tiger versions of Mail you can remove these addresses by allowing Mail to auto-complete the incorrect entry, Control-clicking on the entry, and selecting Remove Address from the resulting contextual menu.