Grouping contacts

[Silly John Fatty]

Is it possible to group contacts somehow in Mountain Lion?

I’ll explain you why… I discovered this function in Mail that lets you display a picture for each contact in the mailing list.

It looks like this:

What you can see here is that I’ve received mails from the Apple support community, Youtube and Orange. Oh and one from MacRumors

The thing is, I receive a lot of mails like this, not from people but from sites. And the problem is that if you want them to have a picture, you have to add them to your contacts. That’s easy for when it’s a person. One person, one picture. But these sites all have more than just one email address.

For example eBay. You get mail from dozens of different addresses, depending on what you do. And as a result, you have to add all of these to your contacts, so the picture appears for any eBay emails. The same picture. That’s kind of stupid isn’t it…


I was hoping someone would know of a trick on how to group the contacts. I tried to make a single contact for one brand / site, and then adding all the email addresses there, but apparently they’re not recognised by mail but by name and therefore this trick won’t work

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Alright, big fail from my side it seems I tried it again and it does seem to work. I added all email addresses from one site to a single contact and it works. Not sure why it didn’t work before, because it doesn’t work when they have different domains and stuff like this, we’ll see in a minute.

What I’m wondering now is if we can just add a partial address in the address book (for example “@macrumors.com”) and then automatically all emails that end with “@macrumors.com” would have this image displayed. I tried doing this by adding it in the address book, didn’t work, however.

It reminds me a bit of intelligent post boxes in Mail. We need intelligent address books now I believe!

 

[supernovae]

I've done exactly the same thing as you; this is a great way in Mail to visually differentiate emails from companies/clients as well as keep Contacts tidier, although I've just discovered a problem with this if you're trying to send to anyone on the company card.

So, I have one card for a company and all the emails that are sent from that company on the card (with name/surname fields empty). Now when I want to send a new email from Mail it forces whatever the first email address' personal name is into the name field of the company's card in Contacts, so everyone I'm including in the email becomes that person. Deleting the name fields in Contacts doesn't help. Does anyone know of a way around this that doesn't involve having separate cards for everyone at a company?

 

[ricede]

It reminds me a bit of intelligent post boxes in Mail. We need intelligent address books now I believe!

Contacts menubar - File/New Smart Group