Contacts

Working in the web application

A contact carries names, addresses, phone numbers, mail addresses, organisations, notes and photos; groups bundle people for mailing and sharing. vCard import and export moves your contacts in and out — the suite reads and writes vCard 3.0 and 4.0.

Lists are in order of last name, then first name; the order button switches to first name, recently added or recently changed. With an address book open, its bar holds the address book's own tools:

• Import reads a .vcf file of one or many contacts into the address book. Afterwards it says what happened to every contact in the file: added, merged into the contact already there under the same identifier, or not imported and why.
• Export saves the whole address book, or the contacts you tick, as one .vcf file in vCard 3.0, which every address book application imports. A single contact exports from its own bar.
• Duplicates shows contacts that share an email address, a phone number or a name. Look at each pair: merge it — you choose which contact stays and, where both hold something a contact has only once, such as a birthday, which value to keep; everything else from both is kept — or mark it as two different people.
• Groups creates, renames and deletes groups and sets who is in each. Deleting a group keeps its members.

Shared address books

An address book can be shared with other accounts, so a team works from the same people. What a share grants is set by whoever shares it — see Share and collaborate (a chapter still in preparation).

Connect an address book

Native address book applications — Apple Contacts, Thunderbird, DAVx⁵ on Android, GNOME and KDE contacts — connect over CardDAV:

Point the client at the server and let it discover your address books; the standard .well-known/carddav entry point works. Changes sync both ways — an edit on your phone lands in the web application, and the other way around.

What to know

• Groups in your address book are real groups — a mail addressed to a group reaches its members; the same group can hold a shared mailbox or a drive.
• Photos are sanitised on import — what you see is what the server stored; nothing executes from a picture.