# Working with Your Contacts

This chapter will show you how to use the Evolution contacts tool to organize any amount of contact information, share addresses over a network, and several ways to save time with everyday tasks. To learn about configuring the contacts tool, see config-prefs-contact. You can import contacts from other contact management tools with the Import tool by selecting File Import, or by mailing them to yourself as vCard attachments.

The toolbar for the contacts tool has the following items:

- Click New Contact to create a new card, or double-click in a blank space in the contact list.

- Click New List to create a new contacts list, which is a convenient handle for a group of other contact cards.

- The printer icon sends one or more of your cards to the printer.

- The stop sign icon stops loading contact data from the network. This button is only relevant if you are looking at contact information on a network.

Your contact information fills the rest of the display. Move through the cards alphabetically with the buttons and the scrollbar to the right of the window. Of course, if you have more than a few people listed, you'll want some way of finding them more quickly, which is why there's a search feature.

When you click on a card, the bottom portion of the page will show more detailed information about the contact. There is also a Map button, which you can click to bring up a web page with a map of the contact's main postal address.

## The Contact Editor

To delete a contact:

1. Click once on the contact.

2. Press the Delete button.

If you want to add or change cards, you'll use the contact editor. To change a card that already exists, double click on it to open the contact editor window. If you want to create a new card, clicking the New button in the toolbar will open the same window, with blank entry boxes for you to fill in.

The contact editor window has three tabs, General, for basic contact information, Details, for a more specific description of the person, and Collaboration for information about scheduling and working closely with them. In addition, it contains a File menu and an Actions menu. Under Actions you will find Forward Contact, which opens a new message with the card already attached, and Send Message to Contact, which will open a new message to the contact.

The toolbar is relatively simple: Save and Close, Print, Close, and Delete.

### Evolution Contact Editor

Evolution Contact Editor

The General tab has seven sections, each with an icon: a face, for name and company; a telephone for phone numbers; an envelope for email address; a globe for web page address; a house for postal address; a file folder for contacts, and a briefcase for categories.

Full Name

- The Full Name field has two major features:

  - You can enter a name into the Full Name field, but you can also click the Full Name button to bring up a small dialog box with a few text boxes

    Title:

  - Enter an honorific or select one from the menu.

First:

- Enter the first, or given, name.

Middle:

- Enter the middle name or initial, if any.

Last:

- Enter the last name (surname).

Suffix:

- Enter suffixes such as "Jr." or "III."

The Full Name field also interacts with the File As box to help you organize your contacts.

To see how it works, type a name in the Full Name field. As an example, we'll use the Ximian mascot, `Rupert T. Monkey`. You'll notice that the File As field also fills in, but in reverse: `Monkey, Rupert`. You can pick `Rupert Monkey` from the drop-down, or type in your own, such as `T. Rupert Monkey` .

### Filing Suggestion

Don't enter something entirely different from the actual name, since you might forget that you've filed Rupert's information under "F" for "Fictitious Ximian Employee."

Multiple Values for Fields:

- If you click on the downward pointing triangle buttons next to the Primary Email field, you can also choose Email 2 and Email 3. Although the contact editor will only display one of those at any given time, Evolution will store them all. Entries that have information in them have a check mark next to them. The buttons next to the telephone and postal address fields work in the same way.

The last item in the General tab is the Categories organization tool; for information on that, read usage-contact-organize.

The Details tab is much simpler:

- The briefcase - Describes the person's professional life

- The face - Describes the person's personal life

- The globe - Miscellaneous notes

### Contact Shortcuts

You can add cards from within an email message or calendar appointment. While looking at an email, right-click on any email address or message, and choose Create Card for this Address or Create Card for this Sender from the menu.

## Searching for Contacts

Evolution allows searching through contacts quickly and easily.

To search through contacts:

1. Select your search focus in the search bar.

2. Enter your query.

3. Press return to search.

To perform a complex search through your contacts:

1. Open Tools Search for contacts

2. Name the rule in the Rule Name field.

3. Setup your criteria information in the If section.

4. If you want to add more criteria, click the Add Criterion button.

5. Click Search.

To show all your contacts, select Show All in the Search Bar or search with an empty query.

## Organizing your Contacts

Just as you can search mail, you can search contacts, although the contacts tool does not use folders or virtual folders. You can, however, create several contact groups, which are basically the same thing as folders or or individual address books. Contact groups may be on your own computer or on the network. Within a given contact group, you can have several categories of contacts. To learn about categories, read usage-contact-organize-group-category.

### Contact Groups

The simplest way to organize contacts is to create additional groups of contacts. If you've read usage-mainwindow then you already know that you can create a new folder by right-clicking in the shortcut bar and choosing New Contact Group. For contact groups on your computer, you only need a name. For contacts on the network, you will need to provide more information about the contacts server you are trying to access.

To move a card from one group to another, just drag it there from the main display of contacts. Note that you will not be able to change the contents of most network contact groups.

### Grouping with Categories

The other way to group cards is to mark them as belonging to different categories. That means that you can mark a card as being in several categories or no category at all. For example, I put my friend Matthew's card in the "Business" category, because he works with me, the "Friends" category, because he's also my friend, and the "Frequent" category, because I call him all the time and can never remember his phone number.

To mark a card as belonging to a category, click the Categories button at the lower right. From the dialog box that appears, you can check as many or as few categories as you like.

### Creating a List of Contacts

A contact list is a set of contacts with a single nickname that you create. When you send email to the nickname, it is sent to every member of the list. This differs from a network mailing list in that it exists only on your computer as a convenience to you, rather than as an actual email address managed by a mailing list application on a server. To create a list of contacts:

1. Open the list creation dialog box by clicking the New List button or selecting File New Contact List .

2. Enter a name for the list.

3. Enter names or email addresses of contacts, or just drag contacts from the main window into the list.

4. Choose whether you would like to hide the email addresses when you send a message to the list. Unless it is a very small list, it is recommended that you leave the addresses hidden. This is the same thing as using the "Bcc:" feature discussed in usage-mail-getnsend-send-to-types.

When you are done, click OK. The list will appear as a contact card, which you can use as you would any other. That includes emailing the list to another person, and, of course, sending email to the list.

To mail the list, open a new email and type the name you chose for the list. Ximian Evolution will address the message to the entire list when you send it. You can also right-click on the list's address card in the contacts tool and select Send Message to List.

Ximian Evolution cannot store contact lists on Exchange servers.

## LDAP: Shared Contact Groups on a Network

The LDAP protocol was created to let users share contact information over a network by sharing access to a central directory. LDAP allows a company to maintain a shared set of contact information. Many companies keep a common LDAP address book for all their employees or for client contacts.

To learn how to add a remote directory to your available contact folders, see config-prefs-contact. Once you have a LDAP connection, the network contacts folder or folders will appear inside the External Directories folder in the folder bar. It will work exactly like a local folder of cards, with the following exceptions:

- Network folders are only available when you are connected to the network. If you use a laptop or have a modem connection, you may wish to copy or cache the network directory. You do this by dragging and dropping your desired contacts into the local contacts list.

- To prevent excess network traffic, Evolution will not normally load data from the LDAP server immediately upon opening. You must click Display All before contacts will be loaded from the network. You can change this behavior in the Contact Preferences window.

- Depending on your server settings, you may not be able to edit all the fields in a contact stored on an LDAP server. Some servers prohibit some or all changes, and others use a smaller set of fields than Evolution allows. Check with your system administrator if you need different settings.

### Configuring Evolution to use LDAP

For information about setting up Evolution to use LDAP, please refer to config-prefs-contact

## Send me a Card: Adding New Cards Quickly

As noted before, when you get information about a person in the mail or in a calendar entry, you can add it to an address card. To do so, right click on any email address or email message, and select Add Sender to Contacts from the menu that appears. Evolution can also add cards from a hand-held device during HotSync operation. For more information about that, see usage-sync.