Lost A Phone Number or Email Address? Use the iPhone Recents List to Help You Find it!

You've texted a friend-of-a-friend (or sent a one-off email), and deleted the message. Days or months (or years, yikes!) later, you need to contact that person again, but the mutual friend, sign, or other source of contact info is no longer standing there with you to feed you the address. If you're an iPhone user, I have good news for you: your missing phone number or email address is probably still cached on your phone!

When you type in a phone number or email address, you may notice that your phone shows suggestions for the information that you're typing in. Some of those suggestions come from your contacts; the rest of the suggestions comes from your Recents List: the list of phone numbers and email addresses that you have sent texts and emails to before. (Bonus: Even though it is called the "recents" list, there is plenty of not-so-recent information in there. My recents list in my backup today, February 25th, 2014 has entries back until June 26th, 2012.)

So how can you see the contents of this magical list?

The Recents List is included in each of your iPhone backups on your computer. You can use the free trial of our software, Decipher Backup Browser, to view your iPhone backup data, including a portion of the Recents List. Here is a screenshot of what you'll see in Decipher Backup Browser:

For emails sent from your iPhone or iPad, you'll see the sending email account address. However, for emails sent from a computer (but on an account also on the phone,) you'll still see outgoing activity, but not the sending-account information.

For SMS/MMS text messages and iMessages sent from your iPhone or iPad, you'll see the phone number, and associated contact information (if a contact exists.)

To take the picture above, I scrolled to a segment a few days ago to show an outgoing email contact from my phone, some texts to my sister-in-law (who is in my address book,) as well as a few outgoing texts to numbers not in my contacts.

I hope this helps some folks! We're thinking of adding this list as a feature to our Decipher TextMessage program too, so we would love your feedback if you find this recents list helpful! Leave us a comment, or send us an email via our support page!