Is Outlook Filling In the Wrong Email Addressess?

You begin typing an email address and Outlook automatically fills it in for you.
You think, cool. How did it know that?

This handy feature is called AutoComplete (also referred to as the cache).

Outlook stores the email addresses to which you've sent email before. You may have typed the address in manually or you may have used the “Reply” button to send an email. Either way, Outlook remembers. Very nice.

Except:
when it remembers incorrect or invalid email addresses
when it fills in email addresses you don't use anymore
when you want to send to an alternate email address for a particular contact.

You can't stop Outlook from saving to the cache unless you completely turn it off or max it out (1,000 entries). Luckily, turning off the cache isn't necessary if you know how to delete the unwanted entries.


1. Start a new email message and type the first few letters of the name you want to delete.
2. Outlook will display the list of matching entries,
3. Press the down arrow (no clicking!) to the entry you want to remove.
4. Press the Delete key on the keyboard.

Follow the same instructions to delete all your unwanted cache entries!