Gmail has refined a fix to its online address book Tuesday to automatically add email contacts by usage, but allow more manual organizational control by user. The release is slowly rolling out to all accounts.
The fix refines a previous one where it would automatically sort previously used email addresses into a "Suggested Contacts" group. If you continually used addresses more than five times, addresses would be automatically added to your "My Contacts" group.
The previous fix would offer a checkbox to turn off auto-adding from the Suggested Contacts group entirely. This option has been turned on, thus turning auto-adding off, for everyone. Furthermore, all contacts auto-added to the My Contacts group have been returned to the Suggested Contacts group permanently. The only contacts in your My Contacts group should be those you've manually added. However, addresses in both the Suggested Contacts and My Contacts groups will still auto-populate in the "To" field when addressing an email.
It's a minor fix, but one that addresses a common complaint and a growing need for a reputable address book in the cloud. As more people start syncing their iPhones and other devices to Google contacts and ultimately caring about how it looks, the more it becomes depended on as a primary address book source. What was once an add-on afterthought to Gmail is now, arguably, a feature many rely on.
See Also:
