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.
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 matching 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 convert to email addresses 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.
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 recipient 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. Then 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.
© 1999-2018 Matthew Allen