Contacts

Contacts are the cards in your CardDAV address books. The concepts — contact versus person versus company — are in People, contacts and companies; this page is the day-to-day.

Before anything works

Contacts needs at least one CardDAV address book enabled in Contacts (CardDAV) settings. Until then the page tells you so and the create button is disabled — there is nowhere to put a new card.

Browsing

Filter by address book, or view All. Search covers name, email, phone and organisation in one box, which matches how people actually look someone up — you remember the company, not the spelling of the surname.

The list pages rather than scrolling forever.

A contact card

Standard vCard fields: names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, organisation, and the rest. What you edit here is what your phone shows after the next sync.

Alongside them Kancil adds its own layer: tags, custom fields, comments, attachments, activities, and links to other records. Those live in Kancil, not in the vCard, so they never travel to your phone — and never risk corrupting a card that another client also writes to.

Moving between address books

A contact's identity is its address book plus its uid, so moving it between books genuinely changes which record it is. There is an explicit move action because of that — it does the right thing with the links pointing at the card, which a delete-and-recreate would break.

Emails on a card

A contact's addresses tie into Mail: the messages panel on a card shows correspondence with those addresses, so opening a contact answers "when did we last speak?" without a search.

Linking

Adding a contact to a task, deal or activity links to the card and, behind it, creates the shared person if there is not one already. That is what lets a colleague follow the same link and land on their own card for the same human.