Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Some corporate mail servers may block vCard attachments because of security concerns, so your attachment might
not make it through. If that happens, create a separate vCard file by choosing your card and then choosing File →Ex-
port →Export vCard. Now compress the vCard file into a Zip file (right-click the file and then click Compress) and
send the Zip file as an attachment to get it through the corporate firewall. Your recipient can then extract the vCard
file from the Zip archive.
Sending messages to a group of contacts
When sending a message, choosing recipients one by one is fine if your list of recipients changes each time or if
you e-mail only a particular collection of recipients every once in a while. However, these days it's fairly com-
mon to send messages to the same bunch of recipients frequently. It could be the other people in your depart-
ment, colleagues on a particular project, your family members, your rocketry club members, or whoever. In
each case, selecting all those addresses one at a time gets old quickly. Fortunately, Contacts can help you elim-
inate the drudgery of addressing these messages. How? By enabling you to place a particular collection of re-
cipients in its own group. Once the group is set up, you just send your message to that group, and each member
of the group gets a copy. What could be simpler?
To create a new group, open Contacts and follow these steps:
1. Choose some or all of the contacts you want to include in your new group.
Hold down and click
each contact.
2. Choose File
→
New Group From Selection.
Contacts adds a new group and places the group name in a
text box so you can edit it.
3. Type a name for the new group and then press Return.
4. To add another contact to the new group, choose View
→
Groups, click All Contacts, click and drag
the contact, and then drop it on the new group.
A really useful variation on the group theme is the
Smart Group.
This is a group where each member has
something in common. For example, consider the following scenarios:
If everyone is employed by the same company, then the Company field is the same for each contact.
If everyone works in the same department, then the Department field is identical for each contact.
If everyone lives in the same city, then the City field for each contact is the same.
In other words, there's a specific field in each contact's card that contains the same data. When creating a Smart
Group you specify not only the field on which to base the group but also the value of the field that each contact
must have in common. For example, if you want to create a group that consists of all your contacts who live in
Schenectady, you need to set up the group so that it includes only those cards where the City field equals
Schenectady.
So why is such a group smart? Because the Contacts application monitors your contacts. For example, consider
a Smart Group of contacts in Schenectady:
