While composing an email on my iPhone I noticed that a bunch of ancient email addresses were showing up when I click the to: field. At first I thought they were saved in my contacts somewhere and I could delete them, but they weren’t, and I couldn’t. Turns out the iPhone is saving all the email addresses you send to and has no method for clearing them out. So after you send a few hundred emails over the course of a few years the chances of auto-fill accidentally causing you to send to the wrong recipient increases exponentially.

Apparently this problem has been evident for years with no resolution in sight. Even if you buy a new iPhone, as soon as you restore from your old phone’s backup all the auto-saved email addresses come along with it! The only way to clear them out is to factory reset your phone and set it up as a new unit, not restoring from backup. Some people have had success with iBackupBot and deleting the auto-fill data from a backup, then restoring their phone with that new file. Still it involves wiping out your phone each time you want to get rid of an old email addy.

Obviously this is a giant hassle and it’s hard to believe Apple is storing this information and not giving the user any way of deleting it. Oh wait, no it isn’t!