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Easily hide e-mail contacts from your iPhone contacts list

If your iPhone contacts list is littered with contacts from the e-mail accounts you have set up in Mail, iOS 7 provides a quick and easy way to hide them.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott

I want my iPhone contacts list to contain only phone contacts. I need neither Facebook friends nor e-mail contacts included. And with iOS 7, there is an easy way to hide e-mail contacts from your contacts list.

I previously covered how to remove Facebook friends from your contacts list, and that process remains the same for iOS 7. For e-mail contacts, however, there is a faster and easier way than going into Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars and then toggling off Contacts for each e-mail account.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

With iOS 7, it creates a group for each e-mail account. This means that right from the Phone or Contacts app, you can hide imported contacts from your e-mail account(s). From the Contacts app, or from the Contacts screen of the Phone app, tap the Groups button in the upper-left corner. Here, you'll see an option to sync contacts via iCloud as before, but with iOS 7, each of your e-mail accounts -- I tested it with both Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts -- are listed as a group below. Simply tap to remove the check next to any or all of your e-mail accounts to hide the contacts contained therein. And should you want to look up an e-mail contact from your Contacts list, you can just jump back into this Groups page and bring back a group of contacts to your list.

For more, I direct your attention to our complete guide to iOS 7.