September 26, 2005

Jim Rossman is your Tech Adviser offering advice and tips for computer hardware and programs. Helpful links are included. Jim Rossman is desktop support manager for The Dallas Morning News.

I use Microsoft Entourage for my e-mail and recently discovered a problem. When I type the first few letters of a person's address, it starts filling in the name for me, which I like. But I received a message from someone with the same initials as someone I e-mail every day, and the wrong name has begun popping up by default.

I never e-mail this other person, so I want that e-mail address to disappear entirely.

How do you go about removing a name from this auto-fill list?

S.B., Dallas

I had the same experience recently, so I feel your pain.

I e-mail my column to my editors and got used to typing the first initial of each editor and hitting the return key to fill in the entire address.

One editor sent me an e-mail from her home e-mail address, which then started filling in when I typed the initials because it came first alphabetically.

Before I realized the problem, I had e-mailed a column to the home address. Not a big deal, but it was an annoyance that I wanted to fix.

You need to check your e-mail program's preferences and help files to see if you can delete individual addresses.

Entourage allows you to choose whether to display a list of recently used addresses when addressing messages. As you stated, this is handy when you just want to type one or two initials and hit return.

In Entourage, open Preferences and click Compose on the left side of the window. Then you'll see the Recent Addresses preferences at the bottom. There is also a button to clear the list.

If you turn this off, you lose the usefulness of the feature, so editing the list is the next best thing.

This sounds strange, but you need to add the rogue address to your Entourage address book, then delete the entry from the address book to delete the entry from the auto-fill list.

Apple's Mail program lets you delete the individual addresses from the list if you open a new message and insert the rogue address. Then click and hold on the address, and you'll get a pop-up menu that includes the option to remove the address from the recently used auto-fill list.

Windows users can find some auto-fill preferences in Outlook Express under the Tools menu. Choose Options from the Tools menu and click the Send tab at the top. You'll find an option to automatically put people you reply to in your address book and an option to use auto-fill when addressing messages.

Adding addresses automatically is easy, but it will make those auto-fill lists grow.

Again, remove addresses from the address book in Outlook Express to remove them from the auto-fill list.