PayPal Address History

When buying things and paying with PayPal, most commonly on eBay but also used by small-time sellers, PayPal presents you with a list of your recently-used addresses. It's meant for convenience, but mine became annoying when the list grew longer and longer, with repeated entries. There's no way to clear this list. Examples of people asking this:

• https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Settings-Archive/Delivery-Address-History/td-p/718771
• https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Adding-and-updating-info/How-do-I-remove-very-old-postal-addresses/td-p/76413

I must emphasise that these addresses are NOT in my address book. They're just addresses I've used God knows how long ago, that PayPal still keeps. They're a problem because:

1. Security issue if someone gains access to your account
2. High chance of sending things to the wrong address
3. Many repeated entries

It's puzzling why PP decides to keep these forever. Not expecting much, I sent PayPal a message. If enough people make a fuss, maybe they'll change this odd decision. I was also considering opening a new PP account just because of this. They auto-replied with an email:

Below this section, it says "If these do not answer your question, please reply to this email with as much information as possible." So I replied and expected more generic replies from PP.

Then, a few days later, I got a call from a +60 phone number. I didn't want to answer it at first. When they said they were from PayPal, I was suspicious, because this is a common tactic by scams. I was careful not to reveal any more personal information. They only asked for my email address and real name. Amazingly, they understood my problem! More amazingly, they said they would delete the old addresses (and read a few of them to verify)! I got this email from them:

During the call, they said they would also give me $10 credit!! I received 2 follow-up emails from them, the one above and this one:

I have since spent the credit so I can confirm this is for real. However, I haven't checked to see if the addresses are really gone.

Now, I had a slightly bad opinion of PayPal at first, and this experience gave me more confidence in them. Not only were they able to fix my problem without me having to explain it repeatedly, they even gave me credit! I'm not saying they'll do this for everyone (they probably saw how much I spent on PayPal), but if you have lots of old addresses you want to get rid of, you could try emailing them.