Where Your Email Contacts Live

Your mailbox is for email. There is no shared address book on the mail server and no contact syncing (CardDAV), so your contacts are kept by whatever you read your mail with: your phone, your mail app, or the webmail you use.

That is worth knowing before you set things up, because it decides where your address book lives and how you move it.

Choose one place to keep contacts

Pick the one your devices already share, and stick to it:

• Your phone account. Contacts saved to your Google or iCloud account follow you onto every device signed in to it.
• Your mail app on the computer. Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail each keep their own address book.
• Webmail. If you use webmail at https://system.atriomail.com/webmail, any address book it offers belongs to that webmail, and it is not copied to your phone or your mail app.

Contacts you keep in one of these places do not automatically appear in the others.

Add a contact

From an email:

1. Open a message from the person
2. Click their email address
3. Choose the option your app offers, for example "Add to Contacts"
4. Fill in the details and save

By hand:

1. Open the Contacts section of your mail app or phone
2. Create a new contact
3. Enter their name, email address, and anything else you want (phone, company, notes)
4. Save

Move contacts from your old provider

Your contacts are not copied when mail is migrated: migration moves mail only. Move them yourself:

1. Export from the old provider (Gmail, Outlook and most providers export CSV or vCard (.vcf) files)
2. Import that file into your mail app, phone or webmail
3. Check a few entries afterwards, especially names with accents

Keep the list tidy

• Export a backup copy now and then, and keep it somewhere safe
• Merge duplicates when your app offers to
• Delete contacts you no longer need
• Remember that an exported file is a plain list of people's details, so treat it like any other personal data

Address book versus mailbox features

Contacts are not the same as the addresses you set up in the control panel:

• Email Aliases: extra addresses that deliver into an existing mailbox
• Email Forwarders: send mail on to another address, including an outside one such as Gmail
• Email Catch-All: catches mail sent to addresses that do not exist on your domain

Aliases, forwarders and catch-alls are not billed, and they can be added to a domain once that same domain has at least one mailbox.

Need help?

Questions about what your mailbox includes? Contact support through the live chat in the control panel.