In the address book, accessible through Shift-Ctrl-A, the Addressbook button, or through the "Tools" menu, you store e-mail addresses of the people and places you want to write more often.
If the options have been compiled into Sylpheed, the address book can connect to a LDAP server for address lookup, and you can use the address book stored on your Palm PDA.
Adding an address to the address book is quite easy too. Rightclick the folder or group you want to add the address to, select "new address" and fill in the dialog that comes up. You can also directly click the Add button in the address book window, and the dialog comes up. In this case the address is moved into the folder/group that is selected at the moment of adding.
In the "Basic data" tab, you can fill the first and last name and provide a nickname. The "Display name" will be used by the "Name" column of the address book window.
In the "E-Mail address" tab, fill the address field and use the "Add" button to add the address to the list. An alias can also be assigned to this address and used when searching for an address. Several addresses can be assigned to the same person in your address book by repeating the sequence described above. The addresses can then be sorted by using the "Move up" and "Move down" buttons. The address on the top will be the first one listed in the address book main window.
Deleting an address is equally simple. Find the address, click it once, and press the Delete button.
You can use groups and folders to organize your address book into categories, hierarchies and aliases. The folders are used to generate a hierarchical organization and contain the actual addresses, while the groups are used to group together addresses that lives in separate folders.
Sounds complicated, so let's see an example: consider
your workmates, they are arnaud (arnaud@company.com),
sandra (sandra@company.com), xavier (xavier@company.com)
and the chief, helene (helene@company.com). You can
create a folder named myGroup, create the entries
for all your workmates in this folder. Now you can create one
groupe named jokes that includes all but the boss
to use when sending your daily jokes, another one named
team that includes everybody for the usual group
(serious) communication, and a third group named
reports that includes the boss, and the one working
with you on some projects for the weekly reports.
To generate this kind of addresses organization you only need to create the entries once, then when creating groups you can select among the existing entries to fill the groups.
The address book, like the mail folders, can be expanded into an entire tree of sections. For this you right-click on the folder where you want to add a new folder, and select "new folder". Then you can enter a descriptive name for the folder, click Ok, and your folder is created.
In this same way you can create a new group in a folder. Right-click on the folder, select "new group", enter a name for it, and that's it.
The group settings window pops up in order to fill the group with addresses. Use the two arrows to add to or remove from the group the selected address. Once the group contains the list of addresses you want it to contain, click the "OK" button to close the window.
You can either enter the first letters of an address
(or alias) in the To: or Cc: field
of the composition window and press the TAB key to
let Sylpheed do the completion or open the address book,
select addresses from there and use the To:
and Cc: buttons to copy the selected addresses
into the corresponding fields of the composition window.
When using the completion mode, when one or more address matches the start you have entered, a dropdown list appears. Select the correct address from this list and press enter to complete the composition window's field.
In completion mode, the search is made on the E-mail address and on the alias. The other fields of the address book entry are not used (name, nickname,...).
When the address book is opened, if you select a group,
using the To: or Cc: buttons will
copy all the addresses of the selected group into the
corresponding field of the composition window.
Using our previous example, you can select the jokes
group when sending you morning jokes, and the reports
one when sending your weekly reports...
Sylpheed can optionally use your PDA addressbook. This option is available if you have compiled Sylpheed with the support of Jpilot. For more details regarding the compilation of Sylpheed with (or without) optional features, see the compilation section.
Sylpheed uses the Jpilot side copy of your address book, so you do not need to put your PDA on the craddle to find an address (but do not forget to synchronize).
In order to use your PDA's addressbook in Sylpheed, open the addressbook
window, select the JPilot icon in the left tree view,
use the File -> New Jpilot menu entry and choose a name for
this addressbook.
Define the name of the Jpilot addressbook file (usually in:
~/.jpilot/AddressDB.pdb) and press OK.
You can use one (or more) of the custom fields to store alternate
Email addresses for the same person.
Now you can browse your PDA addressbook. Sylpheed only has read access to this addressbook, so you can't modify your PDA addressbook from Sylpheed.
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