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Q: My iPhone presented a question, and at the time I did not realize the value in responding YES.  The question was whether to Always Autofill my Personal email address in the TO box on all New emails.

 The value is when I frequently send a picture to myself for alteration or to add content prior to actually sending it to a 3rd party, I send it HOME first.  The Autofill is just to insert my existing address into the new email upon every opening of a new email on my iPhone.  I only want to Autofill on my iPhone’s Outlook – not my computer.  Hopefully the terms fit well my intent.           

 – Charles S.
Houston, Texas

A: Hopefully, my interpretation of your question fits well with what you’re trying to ask, Charles.  I apologize if I failed to fully determine what you’re asking, but the language and structure of your question were rather, shall we say, non-standard, so I did my best to interpret your intent.

There are a few things you asked about that I can answer with certainty right off the top.  Please don’t worry that you feel you answered your phone’s question wrong during (I assume) the initial set-up.  You can always go into the phone’s settings and make changes later, assuming you know the name of the item and how to find it.  I believe I can help with that.  Next, please rest assured that any changes you make to your iPhone configuration, to include whether it performs an AutoFill function of certain fields, are specific to that device.  They will not carry over to your PC or its software, or to any other phone devices that you might use.

So, my interpretation is that during initial setup, your phone asked whether you would like to have your personal e-mail address inserted in the TO: field of new e-mails.  To be perfectly honest, Charles, I have never encountered that feature, and no amount of research on my part uncovered anything like it.  The AutoFill function is usually associated with placing your personal contact information into fields on web forms in your browser. 

I understand what you want to do, and that you frequently send e-mails to yourself, but please understand that doing that is a rather rare configuration, and therefore not one that is likely to be any sort of default within iOS or Outlook. 

I can’t help but feel that you misinterpreted the question about AutoFill, and inadvertently confused using your contact info in forms with the info that goes in the TO: box of e-mails.  You can return to the iPhone’s setup of AutoFill by opening the Settings app on your phone.  Drag down from the top of the main page to expose the search box and type “Autofill”.  Tap the selection that says “AutoFill Safari-> AutoFill”.  Here you will see two types of AutoFill – one for automatically inserting your contact info into web forms, and another for automatically using your stored credit card information.  If you answered “No” in the question to which you referred, likely one or both of these options will be turned off.  Feel free to enable them or not while you’re here.  I’m afraid that neither option will result in the TO: box automatically populating for you.

One thing that kind-of matches what you asked is a setting to “Always Bcc Myself” when composing an e-mail.  If you turn this on, when you compose a new message, your e-mail address will be automatically populated, not into the TO: box, but into the BCC: box.  BCC works a lot like TO, but hides the destination address from other recipients. Composing a message in this manner, but not putting any other address in the TO: box would result in a message sent just to you.  To enable this feature, go into Settings and drag down from the top to expose the Search field.  Type BCC and then tap the line that says “Always Bcc Myself”.  Turn on the feature and close settings.  Hopefully, this will do what you want.  Just be warned that after doing this, you’ll be sending yourself a copy of every e-mail that you compose on your phone.