Why Does Gmail Create Unknown Contacts?
By default, whenever you send an email to a new address, reply to a customer service representative, or email a temporary contact, Gmail automatically saves their email address to your Google Contacts list. Over time, your address book can become cluttered with hundreds of irrelevant, one-time email addresses, making it difficult to find the people you actually care about.
This auto-saving feature is designed to make auto-complete faster, but for many users, it creates an unorganized mess. You can configure Gmail to stop saving these addresses automatically.
How to Stop Gmail from Auto-Saving Contacts
You can turn off this feature from the main Gmail settings on your computer.
- Open your web browser and log into Gmail.
- Click the Settings gear icon in the top-right corner of the screen.
- Click the See all settings button at the top of the quick settings panel.
- Ensure you are on the General tab (the default tab that opens).
- Scroll down the page until you find the section labelled Create contacts for auto-complete.
- By default, “When I send a message to a new person, add them to Other Contacts so that I can auto-complete to them next time” will be selected.
- Change this setting by selecting the second option: I’ll add contacts myself.
- Scroll to the very bottom of the page and click the Save Changes button.
Gmail will reload. From now on, your Google Contacts will only contain the names and email addresses you explicitly choose to save. (Note: If you want to clean up the junk already in your address book, you will need to open Google Contacts separately and delete the entries found in the “Other Contacts” folder).