# 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 Claws Mail, 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

Claws Mail 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 Claws Mail 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.claws-mail.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 Claws Mail 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

Claws Mail can use addresses stored on your handheld device.

### vCard support

Claws Mail can import vCards of your contacts by using Book/New vCard.