Every Way Fastmail's Contacts Keeps You Connected

Fastmail Contacts make it easy to connect with your friends, family, and professional network.

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When we think about email, we tend to think about each message as a separate item, but our inboxes are actually a flowing series of conversations that tell the story of our connection to an individual, to a group of people, and even to a company.

Email is a tool for connection. Keeping track of all the people in your life requires more than just a long list of email addresses.

Before jumping into a new conversation with one of your contacts, you might need more information such as the last time you spoke to them, where they live, or a reminder of what tasks you’ve promised to complete for them.

This is where Contacts in Fastmail can help. They are so much more than an address book, where only a name is attached to an email address. With Fastmail, you have rich information about your correspondent right at your fingertips.

Explore Fastmail Contacts

All address book apps include details about your contacts, but Fastmail gives you something more: your history—see your most recent messages, events you invited them to, and search your complete history!

Your Contacts are also a dashboard for quick actions:

• a call,
• text,
• email,
• and calendar invite actions.

You can reach out right away from your address book, or by just clicking on your correspondent’s name from their email.

For those of you who like to streamline your apps, Fastmail contacts puts a feature-rich phone book inside your Fastmail mobile app. Using Fastmail for email, contacts, and calendars gives you three apps in one. It’s a great way to save space on your phone screen!

We know that email is only a piece of your communication history and for many of your contacts you may have information about their life outside the computer. For example, their phone number, when their birthday is along with gift ideas, or food allergies to be mindful of for the next time you’re dining together. You can store all of these notes on their entry in your contact to help make your next conversation more meaningful.

If you have their address, we use DuckDuckGo on the web, or your default map application on mobile, to provide directions so you can navigate quickly to their address.

Contact groups

People don’t move in isolation: we often have contacts that are part of our larger social circles like other parents from the local school, your siblings, or people in your professional network.

Contact groups make it easy to write to all the people in one of your contact groups in one go. Pro tip: make a group for your holiday card list!

Fastmail also understands that people in your life can cross over: sometimes your work colleague joins your football club. So, we have made it possible for contacts to belong to multiple contact groups.

Contacts in the sidebar

When you’re reading your email, let the sidebar empower you. The sidebar’s People tab shows the people who are on your current email thread. This allows you to see information about your conversation history, their contact details, and any special notes you have saved about them, right there on the same screen you are viewing your mail on.

So, when a friend tells you they’ve moved house, or you are emailed by someone you want to add to your professional network, you can copy those details from the email straight into their contact information in the sidebar without having to switch between screens or tabs.

Supporting existing standards: v-cards

If you need to share someone’s contact details, our Contacts app lets you share the information over email using a v-card (a file with the extension .vcf).

You can also download the information and import the file manually into another app.

The power of VIP ⭐

Marking a contact as a VIP means you can set up special handling for people who are important in your life. When you have a busy inbox, making sure the most valuable emails are prioritized is a key to avoiding that feeling of being overwhelmed.

• VIPs show up with a ⭐ in the message list, so you can see at a glance when you’ve received important mail.
• Filter your mailbox to only show mail from your VIPs.
• Control notifications on the mobile app to only show new message alerts when a VIP contacts you.

Fastmail Contacts: because email is all about people

Our Contacts refresh has been done with your productivity in mind and is one of the many ways that Fastmail is on your side.

We hope we’ve inspired you to take your contacts usage up a notch today by:

• Bringing in your contacts (from Gmail, iCloud, etc)
• Download the mobile app
• Opening the sidebar in the upper right corner of your account in your desktop web browser to check it out!
• Creating a VIP Contacts list

Log in to your Fastmail account to get started today. If you’re not already a Fastmail customer, try out this feature with our free 30-day trial.