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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.

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Matt Elliott Contributor
Matt Elliott, a technology writer for more than a decade, is a PC tester and Mac user based in New Hampshire.
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.