Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with addressbook

Lost Blackbery info, help!

Unnecessarily Sarcastic Bitch — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:25:25 -0800

Help, I've lost all my address book and appointment calender from my Blackberry! I have a Blackberry Curve, either an 8300 or 8500. Last week it started acting up, the roller ball wouldn't work, so I got a replacement BB sent to me via RIM. Once I got the new BB, I took my SD cards out and put them in the new BB, packaged up the defective one and sent it on its way.

However, after it was already sent off, I realized that NONE of my contacts, phone numbers or appointments were on the new BB! My pictures and music were, but nothing else! I do not synce the BB with anything, just enter the data directly on the phone.

My entire list of contacts, over 500 people and all my appointments are gone! What can I do to get them back?

How to completely clear Apple Address Book in preparation for recovery?

odinsdream — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:22:22 -0800

Recovering Address Book data. Apple Address Book phantom entries keep returning, even after deleting the data files and prefs lists. Where are they coming from? How can I get the original data back? I'm trying to help someone recover their address book data after they upgraded from Tiger to Snow Leopard.

They started with around 200 address cards. After the Snow Leopard upgrade they have 20. These 20 don't seem to have anything in common with eachother.

Several online resources indicate that I could use the file:

~\Library\Application Support\Address Book\AddressBook.data.previous

...by deleting the AddressBook.data file, and renaming the above to sit in its place. I've sifted through the AddressBook.data.previous file with an editor. It's 1.9 MB, and appears to contain all of her 200 cards.

I haven't been able to get the replacement working, though, because of this oddity:

1. Close Mail, Address Book, iCal.
2. Delete the entire ~\Library\Application Support\Address Book folder, and delete all of the ~\Library\Preferences\com.apple.addressbook* files.
3. Re-open Address Book.

Result: Those 20 cards are back. The Address Book comes up empty first, then these cards magically appear. The Application Support\Address Book folder now contains data related to these cards, where before it didn't even exist.

MobileMe sync is disabled. There is no other Sync option in the Address Book preferences Accounts area. Where are these cards coming from?

I have a feeling that if I solve this part, I could probably get the recovery working, but I'm stumped.

Help me create order from contact chaos

embrangled — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:32:43 -0800

How are journalists and related professionals managing their contact lists these days? Dead tree contact books or digital wizardry, I want to know about both. After a busy short-term contract, I have three months of emails and scribbled notes comprising hundreds of beat-specific contacts. Clearly, I should have come up with a coherent way of dealing with these contacts, well, three months ago. Nevertheless, I now have a few free days to devote to creating a totally bitching contact management system.

Is the battered dead-trees contacts book of yore still the way to go? If so, what should go in the book and how should I organise it? I like the idea of a physical book, but I'm not keen on the mess that's created when contacts need to be amended, nor on the disruption of starting over when I finally run out of pages.

Alternatively, is there a standalone program that would let me carry my contacts with me on a USB thumbdrive? I like the idea of a searchable database with keywords and tags, but I can't install new software on the computers at work and I don't want to risk adding confidential sources to a web-based service.

How do you manage your contacts list?

Mac Address Book to Microsoft Excel?

bibbit — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 06:08:45 -0800

My main computer is a Mac (iBook) and I use the Address Book and Apple Mail. I also manage the email list for a group, and I need to be able to export the list of email addresses to either Excel (preferably) or Word. I haven't figured out how to do that. The contacts are all separate addresses in my Address Book (people come and go on the list so I need to be able to find and delete people easily). I need to send the whole list of email addresses to people using PCs often enough that I'm willing to buy a program to help me to do this if necessary.

In other words, how do I get a list of email addresses off Address Book and into Excel, Word, or some program where I can easily translate the email addresses into Excel or Word?

How to remove built-in auto-complete entries from AOL's email client?

gemmy — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:37:59 -0800

How to remove the built-in auto-complete entries from AOL's email client? My auntie uses AOL to access the internet. Whenever she goes to send an email and starts typing in the "To:" field, the software tries to auto-complete a match from her address book. Pretty standard. She can remove erroneous auto-complete entries (like mistyped new email addresses, which get added to the list automatically if she hits send without noticing) by deleting them from her address book.

However, there are a bunch of AOL-centric email addresses that show at the top of the auto-complete entries. Things like aolmedia, aolhelp, etc. There is no option for removing these entries from the address book, and there doesn't seem to be any way to remove them from the auto-complete list. They disappear if you add more letters, but they are confusing her. I have spent some time on AOL online help and on various forums trying to figure out a way to remove those addresses from the auto-complete list, with no luck.

Normally it's easy to fix any issues, even long distance, as my parents live nearby and are tech savvy. But we are all stumped here. Before I install the client in order to troubleshoot (shudder!), I figured I would ask here first. Anyone know how to get rid of these built-in auto-complete entries? AOL 9.5, running on Windows XP.

(Ditching AOL is not an option. If it was, I wouldn't be asking. She has used it for ages and is comfortable with it.)

My precious girlfriend is too exquisite for words.

johannahdeschanel — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 08:51:11 -0800

If actions are doubtlessly mightier than words, would this person be considered trustworthy? I have a friend who has been in a long distance relationship for about a year while her boyfriend is working abroad and waiting for her to go to school where he is. Boyfriend has come home to visit her many times, and visa versa. They are definitley an exclusive couple but they appear to be cut from different cloths. She grew up around all sorts of social butterflies who understand certain types of obligation in relationships, while his behavior in relationships is not always conventional. Recently, she found his address book on his computer. Entries consisted of mostly women, and notes about them containing details of how 'amazing' or 'exquisite' they are. When she saw her name, there were no descriptions or words describing her beauty. He is a decent and somewhat nerdy person who treats her like gold, and he has regularly told her how beautiful, smart, amazing, exquisite, funny, talented, etc. she is in real life (same list of adjectives)...in addition to going out of his way to do nice/cute things for her and spending lots of money on her. But if he really has such strong feelings for her&only her, why wouldn't he write it down, the way he wrote about the other 'friends'? If he thought she was so mysterious and intriguing and dear to his heart, why wouldn't he think of her when he was writing about other people? Is this normal behavior for couples to not acknowledge each other in addressbooks? Since they are already so familiar with each other do they not need to 'remember' each others' qualities in notes (the way one would need to remember friends from foreign countries)? She believes he would never physically cheat on her, but is this 'emotional cheating'? As long as they both know in their minds that they are the Only Ones for each other, should she let actions always speak louder than words and forget about it or should she talk about it with him? What is a reasonable response to this?

cross platform shared address book

cowmix — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:29:21 -0800

What is the best / easiest shared cross platform shared address book solution out there? I'm a part of a small organization (50 people) spread across the country. Our company uses Linux (Thunderbird), Mac (Mail.app) and Windows (Outlook). What is the best solution to setup that will allow all of use to share a common contact list? I'm assuming LDAP will be used for address lookups but what is the best way to allow people to add entries. If not a LDAP based solution, what else can we use?

Mobiles & Calling Cards - can they live happily ever after?

Tbola — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:28:04 -0800

Is there a way to make using my calling card with my mobile phone suck less? I have a Blackberry 8800, but I think this question is fairly generic to any mobile phone with an address book.
Here goes. I am supposed to use a calling card for all of my long distance calls.
So that means I need to dial the calling card 1-800 number, enter my account number, enter my PIN number, and then, finally enter in the number that I'm calling.
Is there a way I can automate any of this?
My knowledge of how to use the phone pretty much consists of: find entry in address book, highlight it, hit SEND.
I don't know if it's possible to call one number, then while still on that call, send more digits from the address book.
Basically, I don't want to have to write down the number I really want to call, then get out my card, punch in all of those digits, then punch in the number I've just written down.
Call me the opposite of old-fashioned, but if I have to break out a pen and paper for a number that's already in my address book, I feel like we've made an evolutionary misstep somewhere along the way.
Please help.

mail2web/addressbook/iphone groups synching possible?

spyke23 — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:42:15 -0800

I've set up mail2web as an Exchange server on my iPhone purely for my contacts from Apple Addressbook, but it doesn't seem to pick up the groups the contacts should be in. is this possible at all? Or am I doing something fundamentally wrong?

Free online address book, please

arcticwoman — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:29:24 -0800

Please recommend a free online address book for my slightly technophobic step-mom. I've found a bunch that might work, but not having any experience with them, I don't know which are safe and which are going to sell her info to spammers. The easier to use, the better.

how to share contacts in a single file?

ethel — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:27:10 -0800

Any way to have a shared Address Book while using Thunderbird? My two-person office used to have only one email address (yes, we are that lo-tech), and only recently have we switched over to our two separate email addresses.

My question: is it possible on Windows XP (using Thunderbird, but we would be willing to switch to a new program) to share a contacts/address book over a network of two computers? We have 300 filmmakers whose work we distribute and need to keep track of all their up-to-date info. So instead of changing it two times on our two separate address books, is it possible to share contacts in a single, shared file? It seems like something that would be easy to do, my tech-dumb self just can't seem to figure it out.

Thanks in advance for any help, mefites!

Can Address Book (OSX) show all of the LDAP entries in the given search base?

odinsdream — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:10:06 -0800

Creating a shared address book on an LDAP server to be accessed from Mac clients. Can I somehow get the directory to show all of the entries without having to search for one? Goal: Company address book stored in the LDAP server on OSX Server, searchable and browesable by anyone authenticated.

Here's my problem. All of the tutorials I've found end with Address Book connected to the LDAP server, and the entries stored, but you have to type a name to get it to show up. There is no list of entries in the directory.*

How can I get Address Book to show all of the LDAP entries in the given search base? This is a very small company, there is no danger of queries returning thousands of entries.

This is not going to fly with the client. "What do you mean I type in who I'm looking for? I don't know who I'm looking for, if I knew that I wouldn't be looking for them."

Online sharable address book?

barefoot — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 13:21:04 -0800

I'm looking for an online, free address book that my partner and I can share -- so we should both/each be able to log in to access it, rather than it being linked to just one person's email address. Bonus if it provides a good way to handle address-book entries for, say, a married couple (i.e., two people in one entry), and bonus if the user can choose/configure which fields any given entry contains. Must be usable on a Mac, preferably w/ Safari.

Help me get a small business network of Macs organized

jeffxl — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:42:00 -0800

Some clients of mine have a small consulting business that is rapidly expanding. What started as 1 desktop computer has turned into 4 desktops, 4 laptops (and recently 2 iPhones), and they'll soon be adding some more desktops. They're moving some of the computers out of their home office, and into a "real" office next week and I'm really trying to nail down a good setup for them. I'm looking for your advice on how you've organized a smallish network of Macs, allowing anywhere access of Files, Email, Calendar and Address Book. Ever since this network started expanding, they've wanted the same thing: To access their files and email from anywhere, and to have a common Calendar, and to have a common Address Book. By "common", I mean, able to be accessed from any computer (laptop or desktop) whether online or offline, and whether on site or off. This had been a little tricky to handle, and has turned into a nightmare since I moved across the country (read: has turned into phone-tech-support hell).

First, a brief (well, I tried to be brief, anyway) background of the last 4 years, so you know what I've tried:

Email
I used to have them all set up with IMAP accounts on the hosted web server we use, until that web server crashed, losing all of their mail, which really upset them (sensibly). I switched web hosts and downgraded them to POP accounts, so they'd always have a local copy of their mail (which proved useful when they wanted to access things offline). This was fine, until they started complaining that they couldn't tell if someone in the organization had responded to an email at another computer. For this, I set up a Gmail account for them, and had all of their email forward to it. Then I set up accounts in Gmail so they could respond from the appropriate account, while having all their mail in one place, accessible from anywhere. They used this occasionally. At some point, I tried switching them over to Google Apps for your domain, which sounded perfect for managing things, but it ended up not working due to weird POP access issue, where GMail would only download messages once, meaning only one computer got the message, instead of all of them. Apparently this is a known issue, but was not known to me until it was too late, and I ended up wasting a weekend switching them over and back. I have since read about the "recent:username@gmail.com" trick to prevent this, but have not decided to switch them over to GAfYD, again.

Calendar/Address Books
I first had them set up on Entourage/iCal/Address Book. They all used Sync Services to sync the Address Book and Calendar to .Mac, and all the other computers got the information from that. This worked pretty well for a while, aside from when they decided to turn sync off (and then complain to me that it wasn't working). But then the Calendar cancer started: at first, one computer started getting many duplicate events. This was easily remedied by finding valid data, and reseting the sync with .Mac. This happened every 3 months or so. Then, a month ago, something like 15,000 duplicate calendar entries propagated to other computers, and all hell broke loose. I ended up finding a script to clean out all the bad data, and fed up with sync, I thought I'd get them to give Google Calendar a try. This has been working fine as a calendar, but now they're not sure what to do with their Notes/Tasks that Entourage used to handle.

I got all their data into GCal, and they seem to be satisfied with it, aside from the fact that it can't be accessed while not online. This was further complicated when they went early adopter on my ass, got an iPhone before I did, and wanted their calendar and address book to sync to it via iCal. I assume they can point their phones and other computers at Google's Private iCal feed to get all that data, and it will stay available. I assume this will work, but it has yet to be set up. I suppose the Address book will still have to do the sync via .Mac.

Files
Initially, I had their computers networked using their main workstation (G5 Tower) as the central-file-server, and had the others automatically mount the G5's hard drive for file sharing. This got confusing for them, as their computers are a mess, with folders and files scattered everywhere and structures duplicated between machines. They'd get messed up figuring out whether the files they were looking at were on their computer or on the G5. Also, from time to time the computers would just lose contact with each other, which would require a phone call to me to get them back up. (It was nothing too odd, just rebooting, typing in the address of the computer again, etc, aside from the time the ethernet cable got moved from Port #1 to port #2 on the G5, and the static IP settings I set up got messed. They still don't know how it got switched. Unreal.)

When the latest Airport Extreme came out, I thought AirDisk would be the ultimate solution, but it turned out to be nothing but trouble again. First, the speed was horrible (even wired into their network), and second, MS Word bombed every time you tried to save to the AFP disk. This was apparently a known, fairly common problem with AFP disks and word, so I tried connecting via SMB instead, which worked for a while. That failed in the end, though, since the easy-peasy Airdisk shows its seams when trying to use SMB instead of AFP. They had so many connection problems, that we finally ditched it and went back to our previous solution.

Based on the information I've given, does anyone have any advice? Do you see completely boneheaded things I've set up? Better solutions? What do you use?

Also, would OS X server make their lives (and mine) easier, in any way, or is that just adding unnecessary complexity to the equation?

What is the best Address-Book-like app for a Mac?

dvjtj — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:19:37 -0800

What is the best Address-Book-like app for a Mac? I have a bunch of contacts scattered across different programs - email, Entourage, Thunderbird, etc. I'm trying to find the 'killer app' that stores all the info, allows me to group people, and retrieve the information easily. Is there a great program for Mac that does this?

Help my wrangle all my address books into one!

fenriq — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 11:57:26 -0800

Synching various address books? I've got several address book systems on my computer and its a drag to go from one to the other to the other trying to find the most up to date and complete contact information. Is there a fairly straight forward way of synching them into one location?

I've got Palm, yahoo exports, Mac's internal address book and Thunderbird's address book in addition to several contact lists contained in Excel format.

I've tried doing it by hand and its an exercise in frustration. Any help in automating the process would be great.

Recover my address book?

mullacc — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 17:33:42 -0800

OhNoesFilter: Is it possible to recover the address book that was lost in an ill-fated sync attempt between my Mac and my Motorola phone? iBook running Tiger and a Motorola RAZR w/ Bluetooth. My first sync started to hang and I ended up restarting the computer. I didn't think to check the phone or address book when I restarted. I must've sync'd an empty address book to the phone or vice versa. Anyone have ideas about a possible recovery? I assume this is more likely on the Mac than the phone, but either way would be excellent. And while I recently backed up my music on an external HDD, I didn't get around to backing up the rest of my data.

How to get groups out of Outlook Express on Windows?

sfz — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 16:22:37 -0800

OK - I just bought an iMac to replace our dying Windows machine at home. I've successfully moved over almost everything - email (thanks to emailchemy), bookmarks, contacts, calendar items, documents. But I'm stuck on one thing - how can I reproduce the groups of contacts from our old windows outlook express address in the OS X address book? I would rather not have to recreate them one address at a time if I can avoid it. Thanks!

address book software with mapping function

jessamyn — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 07:34:09 -0800

I am trying to find some software that exists in my mind, but I don't know if it exists in real life. I want a way to represent the people in my address book as dots on a [US] map, somewhat dynamically. OSX or web-based. Free or cheap, not subscription-based, though I would pay more for the exact right app. I travel often and tend to ask the same question over and over again "Who is near where I am going to be?" Since I often drive places, the question expands to the more complicated "Who is on the way to where I am going?" What I'd like is a way to keep track of people's contact info in some sort of address book that would allow me to see where they lived on a US map. Currently, I do this with a map on paper and a magic marker. This may be the best way, but then again it may not.

- Ideally this software could then BE my address book, so it would hold other things like phone numbers, birthdays, whatever. It could have one big freeform text area, that would be fine.
- Ideally I could import data into this from my existing address book as CSV or tab delimited data.
- Ideally I could look at a big US map, or a map for a specific state.
- Maps don't have to have other features like county lines, roads, etc.
- Doesn't have to be more specific than zip code level, I can do street maps myself some other way.

I assume salesmen use something similar to this for managing contacts, but I'm not even sure I know what something like this would be called. Also the mapping feature is essential, not optional. Does such a program exist?

bebo.com: good or evil?

sanitycheck — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 14:20:35 -0800

I've gotten a couple e-mails from bebo.com recently as friends have signed up with the service. Should I join as well? It seems like a good idea in theory, especially since my group of friends tends to be a bit nomadic and it is difficult to keep up to date on everyone's current snail mail address and phone number. However, I know next to nothing about these Bebo people. Can I trust them with mine and my friends' e-mail and snail mail addys?

importing address book from hotmail to entourage

mdn — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 07:36:49 -0800

Can I import my address book from hotmail to entourage? I'm running OS X (10.3), and have hooked up my school account and my hotmail account to Microsoft's Entourage mail program. Everything's fine except that I can't figure a way to fill the address book other than manually entering each address. What am I missing? Directly importing the entire hotmail address book would be best, but even just auto-entering the addresses of received email would be something.

How do I get my old defunct Mozilla Mail address book (backed up onto USB) into Thunderbird?

SpecialK — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 18:09:01 -0800

How do I get my old, defunct Mozilla Mail address book (as in, I don't have mozilla installed due to a drive failure, but have a backup of my files on my backup USB drive) into Thunderbird?

Importing CSV viles into OSX

luriete — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 16:41:53 -0800

I have several hundred contacts with all sorts of information in my old OS9 outlook, which I must keep using for awhile due to our antiquated network. However, I was able to export my contacts as a "csv" file which seems to be some sort of excel spreadsheet. How do I import it into my OSX address book?

Address Book Software

mathowie — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 12:44:21 -0800

I'm looking for shared, distributed address book software for a small company that hopefully works read/write on the web. Suggestions? (more inside) We're a small organization with a lot of business contacts. Currently we're using a shared php webcalendar app for calendaring but we need an address book solution that works for all (without public access, just for employees).

We're on different platforms so web-based is probably easiest. We don't need a giant MS Exchange setup just for the address book, but I guess we could run an LDAP server if that was the easiest way.

Ideally we'd want all employees to be able to freely view, add, and edit a giant address book that was searchable and useful. Is there any open source project or commercial software that does that? I can't seem to find anything that fills the bill.