Remove old email address in auto-complete

[wpher56]

I cannot get rid of old email addresses in the auto-complete drop-down list in Thunderbird.
I have the last version of Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, for Windows.
I tried with Del or Shift-Del, no chance.
Is there any way to fix this problem ?
Thank you
Pierrot

[LIMPET235]

Moving this to Thunderbird Support..

[Anon9934]

From Beth at:

http://marist89.blogspot.com/2006/05/th ... ok_10.html

This one is about as counter-intuitive as it gets. The trick is that you don't delete auto-complete entries from the main Thunderbird window -- you delete them from the autocomplete cache as accessible from within a new email.
* Turn auto-completion on
* Open a new email
* Within the email window, click the Contacts button (should create a pane at the left with the list of addresses)
* Delete the entry you don't want.

I've done this successfully on my machine.

[DanRaisch]

There is no "autocomplete cache". All suggestions come from your address books. That's why deleting the entry from the Contacts list in the compose window is successful. You are, in fact, editing the content of the address book(s).

[wpher56]

OK, I got it ! DanRaisch is right, there is no cache, everything comes from the address book. The trick is that I had a backup of my address book, and Thunderbird looks for all entries in all address books. I removed the duplicate entries and the problem is gone. Thanks alot for this great support.

[DanRaisch]

You're welcome.

[lhite]

i just ran in to this problem, and couldn't find a definitive answer anywhere, but finally figured it out on my own. so just in case someone else comes along with this problem, here's what i discovered. if you have multiple address books, when you search for an address Thunderbird will ONLY search the currently selected address book. i had an erroneous address which kept popping up with auto-complete, and when i used the search tool the bad address wouldn't be found -- because it wasn't in my first address book, it was in another book. when i finally realized that the search wasn't searching all the address books, i did a separate search on each book and found the culprit. voila, problem solved.

this looks like a design issue to me -- while the auto-complete feature defaults to searching ALL address books, the search tool defaults to searching only the currently selected book. at the very least there should be some way to do a search of ALL the address books with one search. having auto-complete work one way and search work another way is inconsistent.

lee

[DanRaisch]

Locking this due to the age of the original posts. It will remain available for reading but no new posts will be accepted to this thread.