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Help How to remove e-mail contacts from my phone?

A

AkZ

Lurker
Hi,

I just got this Ace from behalf of my work, and as soon as I synced my gmail with the phone, it transferred all my HUNDREDS of email contacts to my PHONE contacts! Now this is annoying as I want to keep the phone features separate from email features, and if I want to write an email, I go to my email account.

I was able to filter the emails from the phone contact list, but whenever I'm sending a text message and go to contacts from there, I see all the d*mn e-mail addresses in the list. So far I haven't found a way to filter those contacts away.

Any help?
Thanks!
 
There is an option to only display contacts with phone numbers.
Of course if those contacts also have email addressess then they will still be shown.
 
Contacts/left button then more/display options then hide gmail contacts or facebook or whatever the hell contacts you want :D
 
I had the same problem, and what I did to fix it just now, is: Export contacts onto the SD card (contacts-settings-import/export) ... then restored factory settings. As i am relatively new to the phone I only have a handful of applications that i would have to download again. I assumed that I would simply have to import my contacts back into the phone from the SD card but I found that after the factory reset they were already there, and all the email contacts from my messaging list were gone, just my phone contacts remained :-) Now i am setting my gmail syncing to emails only and will not sync my facebook data so that it doesnt happen again, hopefully. Its now just a matter of downloading the apps that I want to use, which is not too much of a problem for me.
 
I found that after the factory reset I still found unwanted contacts in my messaging folder but thankfully i manged to clean them all up. if you have email accounts or facebook, twitter etc. check what contacts you have stored. I ended up deleting my hardly used hotmail account from my facebook page and that helped i think. then i found a couple of hidden contact folders in my gmail account, which i deleted. after that I found all these contacts in my messaging folder dissappear. Basically i deleted all contacts in my email accounts, bluetoothed my phone contacts into my my computer, added all the email address and synced them back into my phone. its now organized nicely with phone contacts and emails. all other accounts like facebook i keep contacts unsynced. hope that helps :-)
 
Steps to delete unwanted email ids from the phone when all contacts- phone no. and email ids are synced between Gmail and phone)

1. Export all contacts from Gmail to a google csv format file
2. Delete all contacts from Gmail except the ones you want on the phone (was easy in my case as i had a separate group where i stored my phone contacts)
3. Delete all contacts on your phone (Make sure you set to display every contact under display contacts options)
4. Sync Gmail and phone
5. Once sync is completed switch off the sync feature and never activate it again
6. Import the google csv file back to Gmail

Thus your Gmail will have all the contacts that it had before and your phone will have only the ones you wished to retain.
 
This is so frustrating. Why would it not ask me before it did this? I have done the trick to not see them in my contacts list, but they still come up in messaging. Get this - not only the people in my Google contacts list, but apparently everyone I have ever sent an email to on gmail is now having their name come up as a "possible suggestion" in my SMS program. Wtf. This is a ridiculous situation. I have already installed a whole bunch of stuff, so I don't want to re-format, and I don't think sgy's suggestion will work, since these aren't even real contacts that are coming up, just anyone I have ever emailed - thus they are not listed on my contacts list - I already just deleted all the gmail contacts that were, because since I have syncing off I don't think it matters if I delete them on the phone. But this is thousands of people I would have to go through and delete, and I am not even sure how to do that, as I can't find them unless I am going to send an sms. I keep clicking the wrong contact, because like 80 different ones will come up if I type three letters. Someone has to have a better solution for this. I am using a Note 2. It has whatever the newest Android is, I can't remember the number/name. Thanks in advance.
 
Okay so I just went through and deleted them all from my phone. Sync is still off, so there is no reason they should disappear from my gmail, right? They were all stored in my gmail contacts list, just in a place I had never looked before, so sgy's method would have worked, I think. Still, I feel merging email and phone contacts is ******ed, especially with this gmail system which saves every single person you ever exchange an email with in your contacts list - that feature is actually useful in gmail, where it never comes up and gets in your way, but on the phone it is nonsensical. Anyway, even though I solved my own issue here, I'm glad I joined the forum, looks like some good stuff here. Thanks.
 
Super-annoying problem, but I think I finally nailed. Didn't find any of the above solutions fully satisfying, mostly because when I tried to write an SMS, I would still be faced with all those e-mail contacts
 
Hi, I have an issue where when I want to send an email from my Droid/Samsung. When I start typing the email recipients name in the "To" box i can see lots of email addresses from spammers and sms yahoo messenger messages. They are all in my email contacts for some reason. How can I delete them? Is there anyplace that I can see all of them to delete or do they just pop up when I type the first letter of their name/address? Thanks!
SOB139
 
Many thanks Timothy Blinks for your clear instructions, but something has gone wrong somewhere. I followed all the steps and cleared data etc, now I have duplicate contacts and in some cases the same person 4 times Ugh. I also still have the email addresses also in duplicate. Maybe I've done something wrong along the way but I now have an even worse problem! This is driving me crazy. I have far too many to delete manually. What to do next???
 
There are 2 ways to organize your phonebook properly, first is to use the display options as TimothyBlinks suggested and filter out the contacts you don't want to see, the second is to manually delete them.
If the first option is not possible then i'd suggest you start up on the hard work. Take them 20 contacts a day, use the display options along with this and try to get more contacts out.
There is no easy way to do this, if you had known how to deal with this from the beginning then you would never have gotten this mess in the first place. Almost every new android user gets into this problem, i know i did, took me a few hours to get rid off all the 250 dupicate contacts. :D:D
 
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