The Entourage User's WebLog

Here's a post from the newsgroups on a theme that appears at regular intervals:

How is it that there are addresses in Entourage that do not appear in the Address Book and that I cannot erase? They all appear as I start to type a name into a new message's address fields and have < at the beginning and > at the end. Also they have a little blue dot in front instead of the icon that looks like a game piece.

These addresses come from the 'Most Recently Used' (MRU) list - a list of addresses maintained by entourage from mail recently sent or received. They are there as an aid to quick addressing, so you can easily send a mail off to someone that you have exchanged mail with recently, whether or not their addresses are in your address book.

These addresses can be a problem, because the MRU list can also pick up addresses from received Spam, and you don't want to start sending mail off to those addresses!

So, what to do? You can turn off this feature in the preferences. Under the 'Compose' pane of the Mail & News preferences, there is a check box to "Display a list of recently used addresses...". Simply uncheck this box to turn the feature off entirely. There is also, in the same place, a button to completely erase the list of all addresses without turning the feature off. Press this button and the currently remembered messages will be forgotten, and Entourage will start building the list again.

Alternatively, if you want to erase individual addresses (if, for example, a freind has recently changed email addresses and you want Entourage to forget his old one), simply add the address to your address book, save it, then delete it - it will also be deleted from the MRU.

In addition, you can help Entourage to stop the list from gathering Spam addresses by use of the 'Junk' button. This, as well as marking the message as junk, will remove the address of the sender from the MRU.

Finally, if all this maintenance is too much, don't worry. the MRU is limited to 200 entries, and they are prioritised by frequency and how recent they were used. Any rogue addresses will eventually be filtered out of the bottom of the list as new addresses are gathered.