Address book
Basic management
The address book is accessible via the Tools/Address book
menu. It is arranged in different sections: the Address Book
and its subsections, which contain the contacts that you added locally; the vCard sections, which contain imported vCards; and, if support for them was built into Sylpheed-Claws, the LDAP and jPilot sections, containing contacts from your LDAP servers or handheld devices.
In the Address Book
section, you can create multiple address books; each one is able to contain addresses and/or folders. This can help you in organising your contacts by category. In addition to this, you can create groups of addresses, which can be used from the composition window to send mails to multiple people at once.
The menus in the address book window allow you to do all of this. For example, you can create a Family folder inside your Personal Addresses
address book, using the Book/New folder
menu when Personal Addresses
is selected, or by right-clicking on it. In the same way, you can add contacts to an address book or folder by using the Address
menu, or by right-clicking an item in the list in the right-hand part of the window.
When adding a contact, a new window will appear, where you'll be able to specify the details of the contact in the first tab (Display Name, First Name, ...), and a list of email addresses in the second tab.
A simpler way to save your contacts to your address book is to save them when reading one of their emails, using the Tools/Add sender to address book
menu, or by right-clicking on an email address in the message view.
Exporting and importing addresses
Sylpheed-Claws can import address books easily from the majority of email programs. From the Tools
menu in the address book, you will be able to import Pine or Mutt address books. As these formats are not so widespread, you can also import LDIF files. LDIF is a widely-used format, so most other email programs can export their address book to this format.
Importing an LDIF file is done via Tools/Import LDIF file
and is a three-step operation: select the file to import and an address book name, check the fields you want to import if the defaults do not please you, then use the Save
button.
Filtering messages using the address book
It is possible to filter messages by matching addresses found in
headers against the address book, use for this the match type
Found in addressbook
when defining the condition
expression of a filtering rule. You have to select the address header
to match against a part of the address book. The address header can be
To, From, Cc, Reply-to and Sender (if at least one address in that
header matches, the rule will be applied). Some special items allow to match
at least one address found in Any
address header, or to
match All
addresses found in all address headers. Click
the Select...
button to choose the address book part to
search in (either a book or a sub-folder), or select Any
to search in the whole address book.
Advanced features
Using LDAP servers
LDAP servers are used to share address books across networks. They are often available in companies. Enabling an LDAP server in Sylpheed-Claws is quite straight forward. Choose Book/New LDAP server
in the Book
menu, then choose a name for this LDAP server. Enter the hostname of the server (e.g. ldap.sylpheed.org
), its port, if necessary (the standard port is 389). You can then either fill in the Search Base
yourself if you know what to use, or click on Check Server
to have Sylpheed-Claws attempt to guess it automatically. If your server requires authentication, you can set it in the Extended
tab.
When you close this window by clicking Ok
, the server appears in the address book's sources list on the left-hand side. When selecting the server, you will see an empty list of contacts at the right, which can be surprising at first. This is to avoid doing full searches on the server without you explicitly asking for it. You can now search for names using the Lookup
form at the bottom of this list. If you want a full listing, just search for *
.
Integration with jPilot
Sylpheed-Claws can use addresses stored on your handheld device.
vCard support
Sylpheed-Claws can import vCards of your contacts by using Book/New vCard
.