Weblog TUAW details how to take advantage of your Mac’s built-in automation tool, Automator, to send out birthday greetings on the day-of to everyone in your Address Book. Using the Birthday field in Address Book, putting together automated birthday emails is just a two-step process in Automator. Naturally, you shouldn’t rely on this method as your only means of remembering and recognising birthdays, but it’s a nice way to send simple notes and get a birthday conversation started, especially with people you aren’t in touch with that often. While you’re at it, you may also want to import Address Book birthdays into iCal. Mac Automation: Birthday greetings [TUAW]
The Marc and Angel productivity blog drums up 10 useful mobile phone numbers to keep in your contacts list—the kind of numbers you don’t use often, but you really want to get at fast when you do. Among them, they make a strong argument to do a little research ahead of time and find a reputable, affordable, and, most importantly, available locksmith: There’s nothing worst than being locked out, especially at night. Save yourself the hassle of trying to find a reputable locksmith with reasonable prices when you are locked out and stressed out. Do a little homework now and find yourself a reputable locksmith that has a 24 hour emergency call service.
Sound advice, and quick to accomplish with a Google Maps or online yellow page service. What must-have numbers are firmly lodged in your phone’s address book? Serve up a few ideas in the comments. 10 Handy Numbers to Save in Your Mobile Phone [Marc and Angel]
If you send email to the same handful of people often—like your softball team or foodie friends—create your own personal mailing list in Gmail using Contact groups. In Gmail, click on the Contacts area to name a new group. From there, you can add people to the group, or from any individual contact, click on the “Add to Group” button. When you’re composing a message, in the To: field, enter the name of your group to save yourself from typing out the list by hand. Looks like this feature is available in both the old and new versions of Gmail, so whatever you’re using, it seems like the best way to send frequent mailings to the same handful of your peeps in one shot. Create personal mailing lists through contact manager [Official Gmail Blog]
All platforms running Thunderbird: The addressContext Thunderbird extension batch processes to and from email addresses for a set of messages from the context menu. Quickly create a new mailing list, or simply add new cards to your address book by selecting a set of messages, right-clicking and choosing “Add Senders/Recipients as Cards” or “Add Senders/Recipients as List.” The addressContext extension is a free download, and works with and wherever Thunderbird does.
addressContext [Thunderbird Add-ons]Microsoft Outlook 2007 offers one-click access to a map of your contact’s location. Fill in a contact address and click the “Map this” button on the contact tab to launch MSN Maps in your default browser, where you can get directions to and from the location. The question is, how do you change the map service to something other than MSN? First person to post how in the comments gets a cookie.
Get Maps and Directions to Your Contacts in Outlook 2007 [the How-To Geek]Auto-complete can save a lot of time in addressing emails, but sending a tossed-off “Can’t wait for this day to end” to your boss Rick instead of your friend Rick … well, that’s trouble. Rob Griffiths at Macworld offers his simple solution for avoiding this in OS X’s Mail, but it’s valid for nearly any email client:
In my case, I created two new groups in Address Book (File -> New Group, or click the plus sign in the lower left corner). I named one da boss (because, well, he is) and the other wrx (which is the brand of car my friend Jason owns) … I then dragged Jason Snell’s contact record into da boss group, and my friend Jason’s card into the wrx group.
Tips on other methods to keep contacts separate are welcome in the comments.
Avoid misdirected Mail messages [Macworld]
