# Evolution Contacts: the Address Book

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.

Double-click on a card to display all its details.

## The Contact Editor

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, Contact, for basic contact information, Personal Information, for a more specific description of the person, including URLs for their calendar and free/busy information, and Mailing Address. In the Actions menu 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's email address.

From the contact editor toolbar, you can Save and Close, Print, Close, or Delete the contact.

### Evolution Contact Editor

Evolution Contact Editor

### 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.

Most of the items in the contact editor simply display the information you enter, but some of them have additional features:

Full Name

- Enter the name of your contact here. 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 for first and last names, titles like "Mr." or "Her Excellency," and suffixes like "Jr."

  The Full Name field also interacts with the File Under box to help you organize your contacts and to handle multi-word surnames.

  To see how it works, type a name in the Full Name field. As an example, we'll use `Miguel de Icaza`. You'll notice that the File Under field also fills in, but in reverse: `Icaza, Miguel de` . If you had entered `John Q. Doe`, the contacts editor would have correctly guessed that the entry should be filed under "Doe, John Q." However, Miguel's surname, "de Icaza," has two words, and so to get proper sorting you must enter `de Icaza, Miguel` in the File As entry.

Where

- Select one of your address books as the location for this contact. You may not be able to write to all available address books, especially those on a network.

Categories

- Click the Categories button to select categories for this card. If you assign contact categories, you can then search for contacts using those categories. For more information on contact categories, read usage-contact-organize.

Free/Busy and Calendar URLs

- Click the Personal Information tab to enter web addresses for the contact. If the contact publishes Free/Busy or calendar data online, using a server other than Exchange or GroupWise, you can enter the address for those servers here. Once you do so, you will be able to check their schedule when creating appointments in the calendar.

## Searching for Contacts

To search through contacts:

1. Select your search type in the search bar.

2. Enter your query.

3. Press return to search.

For a more complex search, select Search Advanced and select criteria that describe your desired contact:

1. Name the rule in the Rule Name field.

2. Setup your criteria in the If section.

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

4. Click Search.

To show all your contacts, Click Clear in the search bar, press Shift Ctrl B or search with an empty query.

## Organizing your Contacts

Just as you can search mail, you can search contacts. You can also create several individual address books, or contact groups. Within a given contact group, you can have several categories of contacts.

### Contacts Groups

The simplest way to organize contacts is to create additional groups of contacts. You can create a new one by selecting New Contacts Group For contacts groups on your computer, you only need to provide 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.

#### Contact Lists and Contact Groups

Contacts groups are not the same as contact lists. A contact group is like a folder or address book full of contacts. A contact list is a single contact which contains other contacts, and is most often used to email several people at once.

### 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.

For example, you could create one card for each family member, then add those cards to a contact list called "Family." Then, instead of entering each person's email address individually, you could send email to "Family" and the message would go to all of them.

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. Novell 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.

Evolution cannot store contact lists on Microsoft Exchange servers.

### 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, you put a friend's card in the "Business" category, because he works with you, the "Friends" category, because he's a friend, and the "Frequent" category, because you call him often, but can never remember the 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.

If the master list of categories doesn't suit you, you can add your own. Just enter the new category's name in the text box, then click Categories and choose Edit Master Category List in the window that appears.

## 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. Remote groups of contacts appear under the On LDAP Servers item in the shortcut bar. They 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 some of 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.