Add Contacts to Your Yahoo! Address Book

Add Contacts to Your Yahoo! Address Book

Add contacts to your Yahoo! Mail Address Book from incoming email or existing desktop address books.

Frequent travelers know the frustration of having data trapped inside desktop applications. Imagine you find yourself in a foreign hotel roomneeding to contact your hostonly to realize that the email address you need is in your Outlook address book at your office. One solution to this problem is to use a web-based address book, such as the one included with Yahoo! Mail, to keep your contact information available from any computer connected to the Internet. Another reason to keep addresses at Yahoo! is that you'll find it speeds up composing email at Yahoo! Mail. By choosing addresses from your address book, instead of typing in email addresses manually, you'll save some keystrokes and save your brain the work of remembering complex addresses.

One of the biggest hurdles to using a web-based address book, though, is the time involved with building your list of contacts. Luckily, Yahoo! offers a number of ways to enter contact information into your address book from manually entering each address to importing addresses in batches.

Entering Contacts Manually

The fastest way to enter a single contact into the Yahoo! Address Book is from inside an email. As you're reading an email at Yahoo! Mail, look for the "Add to Address Book" link in the From: line of the mail headers at the top of the email; it will look like Figure.

Add to Address Book link in Yahoo! Mail

Click the link, and you'll see the "Add to Address Book" form with several of the fields prefilled, including first and last name and email address. You can optionally add a phone number and nickname for the contact and click the "Add to Address Book" button to save the contact into your address book.

Though this is simple, it won't work if you're starting a new Yahoo! Mail account or if you haven't received email at your Yahoo! address from the contacts you want to add. To enter a few contacts by hand, browse to http://address.yahoo.com and look for the Quick Add Contact box at the top or bottom of the page. If you're going for speed, the minimum information you need to fill in is a first or last name and an email address; then click the Add button.

To spend a bit more time and build a more complete address book, you can click the Add Contact button found at http://address.yahoo.com and you'll have the option to associate much more information with the contact:

Name

Including first, last, middle, and a nickname. Note that if you use nicknames to address a message when composing email, each nickname should be unique.

Email

The contact's primary email address and up to two alternates.

Messenger ID

The contact's Yahoo! ID for receiving instant messages.

Phone Numbers

Up to seven different numbers, including home, work, mobile, fax, and pager.

Home Information

The complete address; also space for a URL.

Work Information

The company name, job title, complete address, and URL.

Important Dates

Birthday and anniversary information.

Notes

Any information that doesn't fit in the other categories.

In addition to this information, you can assign your contact to a category that you can set up through the Options link at the top of the page. Categories are handy for grouping contacts by association, such as Friends and Work. If these fields don't meet your needs, you can also add up to four custom fields (also available through the Options link) for extended information.

If you give a contact a nickname in the address book, you can simply address any future Yahoo! Mail to that nickname.

As you can see, there is a lot of information you can fill out here, and adding more than a handful of contacts this way can become a chore.

Importing Contacts

If you've already entered your contact information in a desktop program such as Outlook, there's no need to go through the hassle again. There are several quicker ways to build up your Yahoo! Address Book.

Using QuickBuilder.

If you've been using Yahoo! Mail for any length of time, you probably have a library of emails sitting on Yahoo!'s servers. Clicking through each email, finding the "Add to Address Book" link, and adding each contact could take hours, so Yahoo! built a tool called QuickBuilder. QuickBuilder searches through your existing Yahoo! Mail, looking for contacts to add to your address book.

To get started, browse to your address book and click the QuickBuilder button in the navigation bar. From here, you can select which folders Quick-Builder should look through to find addresses. You can also limit the number of emails QuickBuilder finds by specifying that it should include only addresses that appear more than one to four times in your folders, or addresses from emails received within a specific timeframe. Click Continue to display the list of email addresses QuickBuilder finds. Check the box next to each found address if you'd like to add it to your address book.

You can also add a nickname for each contact before you add it to your address book. Alternately, check the box at the top left of the results to select every email address found. Click Continue to display a list of the addresses that have been added.

Importing from applications.

Luckily, all email application designers understand that people migrate between different computers, locations, and email programs on a fairly regular basis, and if you've spent years compiling an address book in another program such as Outlook, you can take advantage of your email application's export features to use your existing data.

The first task in moving your contacts is to find a format that Yahoo! Mail can understand and import. This is called exporting your address book, and the exporting process generates a file on your computer that you can send to Yahoo!. First, take a look at the four address book formats that Yahoo! understands:

Microsoft Outlook CSV

This is a simple text file with comma-separated values (CSV) in a format used by Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express.

Palm Desktop ABA

Choose the Address Book Archive (ABA) format if you're importing from a Palm handheld PDA.

Netscape LDIF

Use the Lightweight Directory Interchange Format (LDIF) option if you're exporting from the Mozilla Thunderbird email client or older Netscape email clients.

Yahoo! CSV

If you're moving from one Yahoo! ID to another or consolidating multiple Yahoo! Mail accounts into one, you can choose to export into the Yahoo! CSV format and then import the file.

The process for exporting an address book will vary by application, and you can find a list of step-by-step instructions for many email clients in Yahoo! Help at http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ab/impexp/index.html. Generally, you start the export process from the program menu at File Import and Export. From there, you want to choose to export to a file in one of the formats that Yahoo! understands. You'll also want to give it a memorable name, such as address_book.csv, and save it in a memorable location like your desktop.

Now that you have your address book file in a format Yahoo! can understand, browse to your Yahoo! Address Book and click the Import/Export link in the upper-right corner of the page (see Figure).

As you can see, on this page you choose the format of your file, click Browse… to find the file on your computer, and then click the Import Now button. The next page you'll see is your address book filled with the contact information from your export file.

Yahoo! Mail Import and Export

Staying in sync.

The process of importing contacts from another program works well for moving a large number of contacts between your desktop and Yahoo! Mail. But if you'd like a more incremental approach, Yahoo! offers a program for Windows users called Intellisync for Yahoo!. Intellisync is a program you can download and install that will keep information from certain desktop applications in sync with Yahoo! Mail. Syncing address books is only one service provided by Intellisync, which can move tedious tasks such as importing and exporting contacts to the background. For example, if you add Uncle Joe as a contact in Outlook on your home computer, Intellisync will recognize the addition and add Uncle Joe to your Yahoo! Address Book.

To install Intellisync, click the Sync link in the upper-right corner of your Yahoo! Address Book and make sure your other address book application is listed on the following page. At the time of this writing, Intellisync supports syncing the address book from specific versions of seven applications or platforms: ACT!, Lotus Organizer, MS Outlook, Outlook Express, Palm handhelds, and Pocket PCs. If your current address book isn't supported, Intellisync won't work for you. If you find your version of your application listed, click Install Now to download the program.

Once you've installed Intellisync, you'll need to tell it which address book program you use. Start the program and click the Setup button. Click Application Settings to bring up the configuration window shown in Figure.

Intellisync configuration

Select Address Book from the list and then click Choose… to choose your address book application. Find your address book program on the list, highlight it, and leave "synchronize" checked. From there, save your changes by clicking OK, and you're set up to keep your address books synchronized.

Once you've set up Intellisync, you can run it periodically to sync your address book entries in both places. If Intellisync spots any differences between the two address books, you'll be asked to confirm any edits before they're made, as shown in Figure.

Intellisync address book confirmation

To see the details of any changes, click the Details… button to see exactly which contacts are being sent back and forth.

The process of entering contacts into your Yahoo! address book can be a tedious one, but by taking some time to work with the tools Yahoo! has made available, you can build up your address book in no time and have all of your contacts at your fingertips from any location.