Clearing Thunderbird Autocomplete

Remove the address from your personal address book. To access the address book use: CTRL + 2 or Tools > Address Book.

 

it_allchemist - I am not talking about legitimate addresses.  These are old addresses, mistyped ones, etc. that are not in the address book.  They only appear in the dropdown menu when I start to type.

If you have Thunderbird at the default settings, it will automatically add every address you've typed in whether legitimate or not to your Personal Address Book. That's where it gets the autocomplete information from.

Thanks but the addresses I refer to are NOT in my address book.  They only appear (along with legitimate ones) in the dropdown menu when I start to type in an address.  If they were in the address book I could delete them.

Hmmm... In your Thunderbird options under 'Composition', there is a section on 'Address Autocompletion'. There you can specify to look for matching addresses in Local Address Books. If that is checked, then Thunderbird should only be looking in your address books.

If you have more than one, it will look in all of your address books.

Under 'Advanced' options you can find in 'general settings' that you can specify which address book Thunderbird automatically adds email addresses you send to. It defaults to 'Personal Address Book' but it may be set to another one (like 'collected addresses'). If any of the unwanted addresses appear in any of the address books Thunderbird recognizes than it will appear in autocomplete.

I'm assuming of course that you are using the latest version (1.0).

Thanks for sticking with this!  In the address autocompletion section I have it set to look in my local address book.   However, I did see that there was another address book called "OE Addresses" which must have been set up when I imported my OE address book in addition to putting the addresses in my new Thunderbird book.  I deleted that address book which got rid of many of the bad addresses but some remain.  For instance, my daughter's name is Ellen and when I type in "e" everything with an "e" appears in the autocomplete pulldown, including "e@cox.net" which does not appear in my address book.  The others seem legitimate and I guess I can live with one bad one if I have to.  I will explore further but right now, I have to do other things.  I'll get back to this and you later.

In advanced options  it is set to NOT add addresses of outgoing mail to any address book.

Yes, I am using version 1.0.  

Thanks,
susiehoke

Thanks for your help.  I notice that whatever letter I type in the address box brings up that letter @cox.net in the autocomplete.  As you say, it appears to be a quirk with Thunderbird and not too hard to live with.  At least the rest of the garbage is now gone.
Again, thanks.
susiehoke