Overview
People rather than companies, what a contact is for, and the two-way phone sync that makes the archive behave unusually.
A contact is a person. Organizations are billed; contacts are talked to.
What a contact holds
A name, the organizations they belong to and their role at each, and as many emails, phone numbers and addresses as they actually have.
What contacts are used for
- The primary contact on a project, the person you deal with.
- Filing incoming mail from the Inbox against a person.
- Syncing to your phone, so the person calling you has a name.
They deliberately do not appear on invoices. An invoice is addressed to the organization. See People at an organization.
Your phone is part of this
Contacts sync two ways with your phone over CardDAV. That is not a side feature; it changes how two things behave:
- Deleting a contact on your phone archives it here rather than destroying it. See The contact archive.
- Changes made on either side reach the other.
If you never set up the sync, none of that applies and contacts behave like any other list. See Syncing contacts to your phone.
Importing what you already have
Contacts import and export as vCard files, which is what every phone and mail client on earth speaks. See Importing and exporting vCards.