Gmail Phasing Out Auto Contact Addition
Gmail has a very annoying habit of adding people you email to the contacts list without your approval. This feature has been fiercely debated for pros and cons for quite some time. If you are asking for our opinion about this, then here goes, Gmail definitely should have this feature where they add contacts to the list but they should ask the user like Yahoo Mail does.
In Yahoo Mail when you email a unknown contact, you are prompted to authorize storing them in the contact list, quite unlike Gmail, which auto-adds the contact.
The Gmail team though, have picked up a cue here and there and have taken few steps to update the contact manager to reflect the issues.
Gmail will be releasing updates in phases to users, once the update is rolled out you can see contacts in two different categories.
- My Contacts
- Suggested Contacts
The My Contacts section will contain contacts that you have explicitly included, and the suggested contacts will contain contacts you have emailed and may want to add to your “My Contacts” list.
We think that this is pretty cool, since we can choose only those contacts that we want to store and still have a ability to use the auto complete feature to send out emails to people who have contacted us for a certain reason.
What do you think about this feature? Will it make your life more easier while choosing contacts? Let us know.





Alec
January 12th, 2009 at 6:58 am #
Unfortunately although there are now two separate categories, Gmail still adds contacts to your “Suggested Contacts” without asking your permission.
If like me you synchronise your contacts with your iPhone, all these suggested contacts will be added to your iPhone contact list.
A simple on/off switch would suffice!
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