Everyone you can write to, in one list, one card per person, with Compose on each card. Open it from the contacts icon at the top of Mailboxes.
With Fastmail alone, the list holds your Fastmail address books and, if you allow it, the phone’s contacts. An Opensolr account only adds more people: everyone you ever exchanged mail with.
| Source | When | What it brings |
|---|---|---|
| Your Fastmail address books | Always, for every Fastmail account signed in | Names, addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, pictures |
| The phone’s contacts | Only after you allow access to contacts | Names, addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, pictures |
| Your mail, in your Opensolr Index | Only with an Opensolr account connected | Everyone who wrote to you or whom you wrote to, under the name they use most |
The same person from several places is one card: cards that share an address are merged, the phone’s name and picture first, then Fastmail’s. The list never says where a person came from; it only lists them.
- A card per person: the picture, the name, every address, phone number and postal address.
- People are grouped under their first letter, A to Z, then everything else under #.
- The fast scroller on the right jumps through the letters, showing the one you pass; the list is read a page at a time as you move, so even tens of thousands of people open at once.
- The list stays where you left it.
- The search box on top narrows the list by name, by address, or by the digits of a phone number.
- Compose on a card opens a new message to that person. There is nothing else: contacts are never edited or deleted from the app.
In To, Cc and Bcc, the same people are suggested as you type a name or an address, in one list, the people you write to most first. Until you allow access to contacts, the list starts with the way to allow it.
A person’s picture is the phone contact’s, else the one in their Fastmail card, else their Gravatar. Gravatar is asked with a one-way SHA-256 hash of the address, never the address itself, and its answer, or that there is none, is kept on the phone for a week. Without any picture, the card shows the person’s initials.
The Fastmail address books are read again when you open Contacts or start a message, at most every six hours, and only the cards that changed are fetched. The whole list is put together again when it is six hours old, when you allow or refuse access to contacts, when you connect or disconnect Opensolr, or when you add or remove an account.