Yahoo! Hacks

Add Contacts to Your Yahoo! Address Book

Add contacts to your Yahoo! Mail Address Book from incoming email or existing desktop address books.

Frequent travelers know the frustration of having data trapped inside desktop applications. Imagine you find yourself in a foreign hotel room—needing to contact your host—only to realize that the email address you need is in your Outlook address book at your office. One solution to this problem is to use a web-based address book, such as the one included with Yahoo! Mail, to keep your contact information available from any computer connected to the Internet. Another reason to keep addresses at Yahoo! is that you’ll find it speeds up composing email at Yahoo! Mail. By choosing addresses from your address book, instead of typing in email addresses manually, you’ll save some keystrokes and save your brain the work of remembering complex addresses.

One of the biggest hurdles to using a web-based address book, though, is the time involved with building your list of contacts. Luckily, Yahoo! offers a number of ways to enter contact information into your address book— from manually entering each address to importing addresses in batches.

Entering Contacts Manually

The fastest way to enter a single contact into the Yahoo! Address Book is from inside an email. As you’re reading an email at Yahoo! Mail, look for the “Add to Address Book” link in the From: line of the mail headers at the top of the email; it will look like Figure 3-16.

Figure 3-16. Add ...