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...