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Outlook creating recurrent birthday reminders

Richard Crawley 20 Reputation points
2025-07-30T10:57:50+00:00

I saw a question a year ago but the response has expired. With new/changed contacts in Outlook, birthday reminders (recurrent Jan 1 2024 and onwards) are being generated somehow. Could you repost the response with the steps to prevent this from happening please.

Thanks

Outlook | MacOS | Legacy Outlook for Mac | For home
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  1. Marc Vernon 7,190 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2025-07-31T02:59:21.81+00:00

    Hi Richard! Thanks for the follow-up details.

    Since you're using a Gmail account in legacy Outlook on Mac, the birthday events are actually being synced from your Google contacts, not created by Outlook itself.

    Go to calendar.google.com in your web browser and look for "Birthdays" under "Other calendars" on the left sidebar. Simply uncheck the box next to "Birthdays" to hide these events, or click the three dots next to it and select "Hide from list." You can also try going to Outlook > Preferences > Accounts in your Mac Outlook, select your Gmail account, click "Advanced," and look for calendar sync options to exclude the birthday calendar.

    The Google Calendar web interface will be your best bet for controlling what gets synced to your Outlook. Let me know if you can find the Birthdays calendar in your Google Calendar settings.

    Best,

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  1. Marc Vernon 7,190 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2025-07-30T11:36:09.83+00:00

    Hi there, Richard! This is Marc. Thanks for reaching out to the community.

    This issue happens when Outlook automatically creates birthday calendar events based on the birthdate field in your contacts. These events are recurring by default and often start showing up on January 1st if the birthdate is incomplete or set incorrectly.

    To stop Outlook from creating these birthday reminders, you can disable the Birthday Calendar entirely. Go to Outlook on the web at outlook.live.com, click on the Calendar icon, then select the gear icon (Settings) > View all Outlook settings > Calendar > Birthday calendar, and uncheck "Turn on the birthday calendar". This will remove all automatically generated birthday events.

    If you only want to prevent future reminders but keep current ones, you’ll need to manually remove or correct the birthdate field in each contact. Let me know if you're using the desktop app or mobile version and I can tailor the steps further.

    Let me know how it goes.

    Best regards,

    1 person found this answer helpful.

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