Contacts

Contacts keeps the people you work with. Open it at contacts.cactive.com.au or from the app switcher. Contacts belong to a mailbox, like its calendars, and are shared by the mailbox's members: Mail suggests them as you write, sorts their mail into Primary, and shows their card when you open a message from them.

If you're in more than one mailbox, choose which one's contacts to see at the top of the sidebar. People without a mailbox see how to get one; ask an owner or admin of your organization.

Access

Every role has both. See Roles and scopes.

Finding people

• All Contacts lists everyone in the mailbox under the letters of their family names. Names are written "First Last" or "Last, First" (Settings → Display).
• Search in the header matches names, nicknames, companies, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers (with or without spaces and punctuation); every word must match.
• Address books and labels in the sidebar narrow the list. Labels show how many people have them.
• With no one open, the page beside the list shows the birthdays coming up and the people you email most.

Keyboard: C new contact, E edit, J and K the next and previous contact, X select, Esc close or clear the selection. ⌘K (Ctrl K) searches.

A contact

A contact has a name (with title, middle name, suffix and nickname if you want them), company, job title and department, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses and websites (each labeled, for example work or mobile), a birthday and an anniversary (with or without the year), labels, notes and a photo (JPEG, PNG, GIF or WebP, up to 1 MB). It needs at least a name, company, email or phone.

A contact's page has Email (writes from this mailbox in Mail), Call, Edit and, under …, Move to another address book, Remove Photo and Delete. Birthdays coming up in the next two months say how soon, and the age when the year is known.

Labels

Labels group people across address books (Family, Clients, Book Club). Add them on a contact's page or in the editor, where you can pick existing labels or create one by typing it. Rename or remove a label everywhere in Settings → Labels; removing a label leaves the contacts.

Labels are vCard categories, so they sync with Apple Contacts and Outlook.

Several at once

Hover over a contact and tick the box beside it, or ⌘-click (Ctrl-click) or Shift-click a range. With some chosen, add a label, move them to another address book, or delete them. Up to 500 at a time. After a delete, Undo in the message that appears brings the contacts back; they're deleted for good once it closes.

Birthdays

Birthdays lists the next twelve months, this week first, with Email beside each person. Birthdays without a year are fine; 29 February falls on 28 February in other years.

Emailed Most

Emailed Most lists the people this mailbox writes to most, from its 300 most recent sent messages (to and cc), with how many. People who aren't contacts yet have Add.

Duplicates

Duplicates finds contacts that look like the same person: the same email address, the same phone number (+61 412 345 678 and 0412 345 678 match), or the same full name. Choose which one to keep and Merge: the kept contact gets the others' missing details, every distinct email, phone number, address, website and label, their notes, and a photo if it had none; the others are deleted. Merge All merges every group, keeping the fullest contact in each. Not the Same hides a group on this device.

Directory

Directory lists everyone in your organization with their email address and role (read-only; people are managed in Tenant). Add makes a contact of someone, and Open shows the contact you already have. Your own entry is marked You.

Customers

If your organization uses Customers, a contact's page shows whether a customer contact has the same email address: Open in Customers, or Add to Customers, which creates the customer contact from this one (name, email, phone numbers, job title, city and country). A contact's or lead's page in Customers shows In Contacts the other way round, with Add to Contacts.

Address books

Each mailbox starts with an address book named Contacts, which can't be deleted. Add more (up to 20), rename and delete them in Settings → Address Books. Deleting an address book deletes its contacts.

Import and export

Settings → Import and Export imports a vCard file (versions 3.0 and 4.0, as Apple Contacts, Google Contacts and Outlook export them; up to 5 MB and 5,000 contacts), photos included, into the address book you choose. People already there are updated, not added twice: a card matches the contact with the same UID or, when it has none (Google Contacts and Outlook leave it out), the same email address, else the same phone number and name. Google's own groups (My Contacts, Starred) don't become labels. Export saves an address book as vCard 4.0, or vCard 3.0 for older apps. Fields Contacts doesn't show are kept and exported again.

Phones and computers

Contacts sync both ways with Apple Contacts, Outlook and the phone's own Contacts app through an Exchange account for your mailbox: add the mailbox's address as an Exchange account and turn on Contacts. See Apple devices and, on a Mac, Calendar and Contacts on Mac. The Mail and Home phone apps have Contacts too, and links to Contacts open there.

Moved from Mail

Contacts used to be a page of Mail. Old links and bookmarks (mail.cactive.com.au/<organization>/contacts) open Contacts, keeping the mailbox they named.

API

The contacts API lists, searches, creates, changes, merges, labels, moves, deletes, imports and exports contacts, and finds people by email address across your mailboxes.