Contacts
The people you already write to.
An address book that fills itself in from the mail you already have, and looks nobody up anywhere else. What it knows about a person is what passed through your mailbox — no profile bought, no enrichment service called. There is also no importer yet, which is the first thing worth knowing.
- Name fields
- Given
- Middle
- Family
- Nickname
- Pronouns
- History on every contact
- Messages
- Conversations
- Received
- Sent
- First contact
- Last contact
- Last from them
Everything it knows, it learned from your mail.
Most address books fill a record in by asking somewhere else — a broker, a social graph, an enrichment API — and none of them draw that arrow, because drawing it raises the question it answers. There are two arrows here and there is no third. What Ruber knows about a person is what passed through your own mailbox, plus what you typed. Nothing leaves to ask about anybody.
The record
- 01
Names that survive being someone's
Given, middle and family names, a nickname, and pronouns. Names are not one string with a space in it, so somebody with two family names or a name that does not split the way English expects is stored correctly rather than nearly.
- 02
More than one of everything
Several addresses and several numbers, each labelled. Numbers are formatted for the country they belong to, so a number you can read is a number you can dial.
- 03
Custom fields, because the shape varies
Organisation, job title, postal addresses, a birthday, notes, and your own fields for whatever the form did not think of. A contact is not a fixed shape.
History, from your own mail
- 04
Seven figures, computed not guessed
Every contact carries the count of messages and conversations, how many you received and how many you sent, when you first spoke, when you last did, and when they last wrote to you.
- 05
Nothing is fetched from anywhere
All of it comes from your own message index. Ruber does not look anyone up, does not buy a profile, and does not call an enrichment service. What you see about a person is what passed through your mailbox.
- 06
The address book fills itself in
People you write to regularly appear without being added. An address book that only holds what you remembered to type is one you stop trusting.
Organising
- 07
Groups and stars
Groups carry a colour, so a list you use every day is recognisable before you have read it. Star the handful you actually reach for.
- 08
Photos that are not public links
A picture is stored in your own object storage and served through the app, never a public bucket URL — so a contact photo is not a link anyone who guesses it can open.
- 09
Your preferences travel
Sort order, what the second line shows, whether opening a contact goes straight to the first entry, which dial code is assumed. Set once, and it follows you.
What it does not do
Every page like this one lists what a product is good at, which is why that list tells you nothing. These are the limits, named before you find them.
- 01
No import, and no export
No vCard, no CardDAV, no CSV. Nothing in the product reads an address book from anywhere else, and nothing writes one out. If you have contacts elsewhere today, they stay elsewhere — this is the honest blocker, and it is the one we would want to know about first.
- 02
No history before your first message
Because the history is computed from your own mail, a person you have never emailed has none. That is the trade for not looking anybody up, and it is a real cost rather than a rounding error.
- 03
Birthday reminders depend on a job runner
Birthdays are stored, and a scheduled job exists to remind you. Whether that job is connected is a deployment question — on a deployment where it is not, a birthday passes quietly. Better said here than discovered in March.
- 04
Not a shared team directory
Contacts are yours. There is no shared team directory, no per-contact permissions, and no way to hand a list to a colleague. Groups organise your own address book, not somebody else's.
It is included with every mailbox — there is nothing else to turn on.
Open Contacts