Contacts

To create a contact:

Click the new contact button on the toolbar.
Click Contact -> New Contact.
Right click on a "To:" or "Cc:" address in a mail window and click "Add to Contacts".

Each contact can have multiple email addresses associated with the contact record. Different addresses can be selected in the right click menu of the mail window's recipient list.

The nick name is really useful for giving the record a unique "shortcut". When adding recipients to an email, the nick name is searched after the real name fields, so by putting some unique and short name in the nick field it makes it really easy to type in the recipients entry box.

The home and work tabs have all the usual information associated with people.

The plugins tab is where, if you have the right plugins loaded, you can specifically associate a contact with a particular plugin. For instance this is used by the AutoGPG plugin to automatically encrypt and decrypt communications with that contact.

The notes field is just free form text.

Custom fields, which can be addressed via the Scribe DOM are useful for more complex scripting and filtering.

The final tab, "other" contains a field for setting the timezone that the contact is in. This then also displays the local time for the contact, which can be really useful for not waking me up at 2am with an international phone call! *hint hint* :) This local time is also displayed in the recipient list IF the time zone is set in the contact record. Also if an incoming email has timezone information for a contact record, then the timezone field will be automatically updated. This means that if the timezone of the contact changes, like for daylight savings, then the first email with the new timezone will update things.

Using Groups of Contacts

To create a group of contacts you use the Contacts->New Group menu. Then give the group a name and start entering names or email address into the body of the group. If a word turns red then it is matches more than one contact and needs to be resolved to a unique person by right clicking the word and selecting the right contact. If a word is grey it doesn't match any contacts and has to be a valid email address to work (i.e. the email address of someone not in your contact database). If a word is black then it matches a single contact and is ready to use. All names in the body converted to email address when you save the group so that the email engine can use them. You can at any point double click a black word to bring up the contact record for that address giving you all their other details.

To email a group you can either type the name of the group as a recipient or find the group in the add contact window.

Addressing Email

When adding addresses to a new email Scribe will search all the contacts in the normal /Contacts folder and any sub folders of contacts under /Contacts.

The search looks for a matching first name, then a matching whole name, and then a matching nickname.

If a match for a name or email is found then the reipient address entry has a little contact card icon. If the address is not in the database a "To:", "Cc:" or "Bcc:" icon is shown.

If Scribe cannot uniquely identify which contact you meant a red question mark is shown next to the recipient. To resolve the name conflict right click on the entry and select which name you meant before you can send.

To browse for the correct recipient, click the "..." button next to the recipient entry field in the main window. This allows you to search through available contacts for the recipient you want. Just type the first few characters in the search box and the list will seek down to the nearest entry, if the entry you want is now selected, hitting enter will add that person to the email.

If you have a directory service plugin like the LDAP Client plugin loaded then you will have an extra tab on the "Add Contact" window displaying all the contacts stored on the server.

Sharing Your Contacts

You can share your contacts out using the LDAP Server plugin. When loaded it provides read only access to all the contacts under the /Contacts sub folder. If you want to keep a folder of private contacts then place them outside the /Contacts folder.

Use the LDAP Client plugin to access someone else sharing their contacts.