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Getting Address Book info quickly in Mail.app

addressbookA Hawk Wings reader emails to ask:

I’m regularly (as in 2-3 times per day) asked by people to forward someone’s contact information via email. What I’d like to have is a simple way of searching and inserting address book information *from within* mail.app (like you can do in Outlook on a PC).

For example, I get a mail from Ben who asks “could you send me your X’s contact info?”. I would like to be able to stay in mail.app and hit CTRL-Shift-R, type the response and then, without switching to Address Book, hit a keystroke to pop up an address book search pane from which I can interactively search my address book.

When I’ve found the contact, I would like to be able to have the full contact’s info pasted as text (not as a vCard) into my mail message. Do you know of any application that can do this?

I have never felt the need for this myself, but now that I think about it, it ought to be possible and easy.

And it is. BuddyPop, an Address Book search utility, offers a way to get this done.

When you are reading the email in Mail.app, hit the hotkey to bring up the BuddyPop window.

Type the name of the contact you need until BuddyPop finds it:

buddypop_hypothetical

Command-Click on the BuddyPop window and select “Copy” from the contextual menu. Or use the arrow keys and keyboard shortcuts to copy the info. It’s faster.

Start your reply and paste the info in at the appropriate place:

email_hypothetical

All done.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, 2nd February, 2006 at 11:08 am and is filed under Address Book, Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Getting Address Book info quickly in Mail.app”

  1. Bo Link says:
    February 2nd, 2006 at 5:13 pm

    Love the Deadwood character usage. That show is great. I also appreciate this tip. I had to send a buddy someone’s contact info this evening and I was thinking there should be an easier way.

  2. Tim says:
    February 2nd, 2006 at 5:37 pm

    Yes, I like it too. It’s become something of a fad at home.

    There’s a tussle for the PowerBook every night, with me wanting to blog and my wife wanting to watch Deadwood.

    Anyway, I’m glad the tip helped.

  3. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » BuddyPOP: 21% discount for today only says:
    September 19th, 2006 at 6:00 pm

    [...] For the next twenty hours MacUpdate is offering a 21% discount on BuddyPOP, an excellent “quick look-up” utility for Address Book. [...]

  4. Uno says:
    September 19th, 2006 at 7:04 pm

    Hm.. What are those nifty buttons to the right of the signature drop-down?

  5. Tim says:
    September 19th, 2006 at 7:16 pm

    They are the buttons for digitally signing and encrypting messages.

    You access them by selecting the Customize option from the drop-down button to the left of the Account Selector.

  6. Uno says:
    September 20th, 2006 at 1:36 am

    Ah, brilliant! Thanks. Although I don’t have those options. I can only choose to show the priority selector and the bcc/reply to fields. But I searched the Mail help file, and it turns out that I need a personal certificate in Keychain Access to be able to use those features. I found more info in this article: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25555-no

    Gotta get me one of those babies.

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