Address Book

Dansays: Put all your customer service numbers into Address Book

Merlin — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:26:27 -0400

This morning, like a lot of other people, I was locked out of using my PayPal debit card while the site (and apparently its glass-jawed transaction processing network) took a total dirtnap. So it goes. That’s only indirectly the point of this post (although I did kind of feel like opening a “Can of Cory” on The Pal).

Point is, my pal dansays left a great comment on my whiny Flickr post laying out why he's put all the customer service numbers of products and sites he uses right into his Apple Address Book. Great advice that I'll be taking this weekend:

The number syncs to my iPhone, so it's handy when I need it.

I have a record of the number, should the website decide to, ahem, "streamline" their customer service department by removing all traces of their phone number from their website and forcing all communications through email. This happened to me just last week.

I have a central place to keep all notes related to customer service conversations. Whenever resolving disputes, I switch into hyper-documentation mode. Who I talked with, when I talked with them, and what they promised me.

Smart fella, that Dan. 1 and 2 may seem obvious, but 3 is super-clever. If you've ever had to throw down with a dopey company, you know the importance of the paper trail. I really like the idea of having that with me on my Mac and on my iPhone.

”Dansays: Put all your customer service numbers into Address Book” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 05, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Purging info-poor entries from Address Book

Merlin — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 07:25:31 -0400

You may share my Address Book pollution problem — having too many orphaned names that got scribbled on a PDA or were manually added but never fleshed out (like: 10 years ago!).

Here’s a really stupidly useful Smart Group for Address Book that helps identify entries without any real information attached to them.

Seem too obvious? Maybe. But it helped me kill eighty-two entries yesterday that might have sat around for another ten years if I hadn’t made it. Yay, obviousness.

”Purging info-poor entries from Address Book” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 20, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Some handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes

Merlin — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:42:47 -0400

It took me a while, but ever since I've gotten my head around Smart Folders (and Smart Playlists and Smart Groups, etc.), I've started to think about the way I use my Mac a bit differently.

Clearly iTunes is the winner in this regard (watch for an upcoming multi-part series about Smart Playlists on The Merlin Show), but the Finder, and Address Book, and Mail.app also have an amazing amount of power rumbling under the hood. So, in the interest of spreading the love, here's four Mail.app Smart Mailboxes that have been rocking my world over the last months.

Inbox, Flagged

This super-basic mailbox is great for whenever you're processing your Inbox(es). You can blow through all the incoming messages, quickly flag anything that needs a response (CMD-SHIFT-L), then view this Smart Mailbox to visually separate the wheat from the chaff. Select all, move them to your "To Respond" folder, and off you go.

Recently Sent

Like the previous Smart Mailbox, this simpleton makes it easy to bubble-up messages that you often need to refer to, but that can be a pain to locate the old-fashioned way. Just shows you any messages you've sent to other people in the last couple days. Yeah, it's obvious, but, man, will you ever love this once you remember it's there.

[ also via Red Sweater Blog - Mail Smart Folders ]

From a given Address Book group

In Address Book:

In Mail.app:

A lot of folks don't realize that Smart Groups even exist in Address Book. Consequently, even fewer know that the contents of both ad hoc and Smart Groups can be searched on from inside Mail.app.

So in this example, I've created a Smart Group with everyone in my Address Book who lives in San Francisco, then I tell Mail.app to group all those peoples' emails in one place.

This is also swell for seeing messages from a company you work with a lot, and it's fantastic for grouping all the email from people in your family.

These particular kind of mailboxes can often be enhanced by ticking off the "Include messages from Sent" box -- that way you also see your own emails to people in this group, allowing you to view your conversations in threads. (Note that this is a lot less useful if your own Address Book entry matches the saved criteria :-) )

If you find yourself searching or -- God forbid -- manually hunting for certain kinds of messages again and again, try to think of a way that Mail.app Smart Mailboxes can do the heavy lifting for you. And, if you add to the mix something like Mail Tags (which adds several very useful search abilities), you can have a lot of automated sexy happening in your email.

Edit: 2007-04-23 11:56:23: Nomenclature corrected -- As Jean points out in comments, these are properly called "Smart Mailboxes" not "Smart Folders." Thanks, Jean!

”Some handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"