Autocomplete Sent My Email to the Wrong Person: How to Stop It in Gmail and Outlook

How it happens

You type "Sar", autocomplete offers Sarah, you press Enter. It was Sarah from the agency you worked with last year, not Sarah in finance. The email had the salary numbers in it.

Almost nobody types a full address any more, so almost every wrong-recipient email starts the same way: a suggestion that looked right. The fix has three parts. Clean up the suggestions you have, stop new junk from piling up, and put a check at the moment you click Send.

Gmail

Remove one bad suggestion

Gmail suggests addresses from your contacts and from Other contacts, which is everyone you have emailed or replied to.

1. Go to contacts.google.com.

2. Click Other contacts in the left menu.

3. Find the address, hover over it, and delete it (or select several and delete them together).

If the address is a saved contact, delete it from the main Contacts list instead.

Stop the list from filling up

1. In Gmail, open Settings, then See all settings.

2. On the General tab, find Create contacts for auto-complete.

3. Choose I'll add contacts myself.

4. Click Save Changes at the bottom.

From now on, only people you save yourself show up as suggestions. It is a little more typing at first, and far fewer surprises.

Give yourself time to catch it

On the same General tab, set Undo Send to 30 seconds. Most people notice the wrong name the moment the email leaves.

Outlook

Outlook keeps a separate suggestion list in each app. Classic Outlook has its own, and Outlook on the web and new Outlook share another. Cleaning one does not clean the other.

Classic Outlook (Windows)

• Remove one: start a new email, type the first letters, hover over the wrong suggestion and click the X next to it.
• Clear all of them: File, then Options, then Mail, then under Send messages click Empty Auto-Complete List. You can also turn off Use Auto-Complete List to suggest names in the same place.

Outlook on the web and new Outlook

Microsoft has changed this more than once. Depending on your version, you may see an X next to a suggestion, or you may be able to highlight it with the arrow keys and press Delete. Some recent versions have no way to remove a single suggestion at all.

If you cannot remove one, try this:

• In Outlook on the web, open People and look for a Suggested contacts folder. Clearing it removes the suggestions it holds.
• Look in Settings for the option that turns off suggested people, so new ones stop being added. Where it sits depends on your version.

There is no undo for clearing suggestions, so do it on purpose.

Undo send

In Outlook on the web and new Outlook: Settings, then Mail, then Compose and reply, then turn on Undo send for up to 10 seconds. Classic Outlook has no undo button, but a rule can delay every outgoing email by a minute or two, which has the same effect.

The check that catches what cleanup misses

Cleaning the list helps with stale addresses. It does nothing for the case where both people are real and current, and you picked the wrong one. For that, the check has to happen at Send, when you can see the whole email.

Presend runs in Gmail and Outlook on the web and checks each email when you click Send. Its External recipients check lists every address outside your company. Set it to Block on the dashboard and Send stops with "Hold on" and those addresses listed, so an outside Sarah on an internal email is hard to miss.

For the inside-the-company mix-ups, write a rule in plain English: "Warn me if the name in the greeting doesn't match the person I'm sending to." It catches "Hi Sarah" going to sarah.lee when you meant sarah.khan.

And if it is already too late, here is how to send a correction email, with templates for an email that went to the wrong person.