The Bat! Help

Adding contacts to the address book makes it easy to manage your correspondents. If you compose an email to a person that is added to your address book, The Bat! will suggest his or her address once you enter the first letters.

To add a new contact to your address book, do any of the following:

1. Right-click the address in the message auto-view area:
   
   

2. Enter the address in the Editor and click the icon to the right of the email address:
   
   

3. Right-click an email in the message list, select "Specials" and then choose between "Add Sender to Address Book" (Ctrl+W) and "Add recipient to Address Book" (Shift+Ctrl+W). Using the Specials menu you can "delete sender/recipient from address book" (Ctrl+B and Shift+Ctrl+B) or add them to "Address History".
   



4. Open the Address Book and use the File -> New -> Contact menu (Ctrl+T) or click the icon on the toolbar:
   




5. Create a new filter in the Sorting Office and add the "Capture addresses" action. The Bat! will automatically add contacts depending on the filter conditions. Using filters you can also delete addresses from the address book:

The Bat! allows you to save all sorts of information about a contact, including his or her email address, name, organization, date of birth, and more. To access contact properties either double-click the contact or right-click it and select "Properties" (Alt+Enter).

The "Edit Address Entry" window appears. At the bottom-left corner you can select the address book to which your contact will be added. For example, you can save your personal and business contacts in different address books. To create an address book use the File -> New -> Address Book menu.

The "Edit Address Entry" window contains several tabs:

Under the General tab you can specify person’s first, middle, last name, nickname (handle) and gender. You can define the display name of the contact (for example, first last name or last, first middle name, etc.) If you want to add this contact to a group, click the button to the right of the Groups field and select the groups. Finally, you can add a photo that will be displayed on the headers pane. Each contact may have secondary email addresses as well. The first address will be used for all new messages by default.

Under the Personal tab you can add some more information about the person, such as name prefix or suffix, date of birth, telephone numbers, home address and web-page. The Bat! checks address books for those who have birthday this day on each program startup or at midnight if the program is running and can remind you of them.



If you need to add company information, switch to the Business tab.

As you already learned from the Templates section, templates can be set for accounts, folders, address book groups and contacts. You can specify templates for a contact under the New message, Reply and Forward tabs. To add certificates, switch to the Certificates tab.



Under the Other tab you can enable the following options: 

- When writing messages, always use character set: You can specify a certain character set for messages to this contact. This can be useful for foreign correspondents.

- Add this address to the instant address (Favorite) pop-up menu: If you select this check box, the address will be displayed in the pop-up menu of the "Create a new message" icon. To add a contact to favorites, you can also check the box in the Favorite column in the contact list of the address book.

- Automatically add secondary addresses to the BCC field: This option can be useful if you added secondary addresses for this contact. If you enable this check box, The Bat! will add these addresses to the BCC field. This function will work only if you create a message using the File -> New -> Message menu in the Address Book.

You can group your address book contacts to manage them more effectively. Each group can have its own templates for new message, reply and forward. You can add a contact to as many groups as you wish.

If you want to send an email to a group instead of entering their addresses, enter the handle of the address book group in the To field. To address each recipient personally, use mass mailing.

To create a new address book group select the address book and click the icon or use the File -> New -> Group menu (Ctrl+G).



Specify the "name" and the "handle" of your group. Remember that the handle should not contain special characters. If you check the "Add Items to the Instant Address Pop-Up" box, this group will be displayed in the pop-up menu of the "Create a new message" icon (see the Address book entries section, the Other tab). If the "Hide items if not explicitly selected" option is active, the contacts of this group will not be displayed in the general contact list of the address book. You will see them only if you select this group. If needed, define a character set that will be used for contacts of this group. Switch to New message, Reply and Forward tabs to set specific templates for this group.

To add a contact to a group, invoke its Properties, click the icon to the right of the Groups field and select groups from the list in the "Group Selector" window.

If you want to send the same email to several recipients and address each personally, make use of mass mailing.

First you should create a quick template containing the text of the email and macros that add personal information about recipients (for example, you can personally address each recipient using the %ABToName macro). Use the Tools -> Quick Templates menu to create quick templates (Shift+Ctrl+Q).



Remember to check the "New messages/ Mass Mailing" box after you finish editing your template.

Make sure all recipients belong to one address book group. If you created a quick template, you will see two new menu items in the address book – "Message using template" and "Mass mailing using template". Sel ect the recipients in the list holding down the Ctrl key and select one of these options.



Specify which action to take: "Put in Outbox" (messages remain in the Outbox folder until you send queued mail), "Open in Editor" (The Bat! opens messages in the editor), "Save as Draft" (messages will be parked and moved to the Outbox folder; they will not be sent until you unpark them).

Thus, this message will be addressed to each recipient personally as it contains his or her personal information.

The Bat! offers the possibility to import address book contacts. You can import address books from the following programs: Eudora, Pegasus, Microsoft Outlook, MS Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and older versions of The Bat! Click the icon on the standard toolbar, or choose Address book from the Tools menu (F8), and select the program from the File -> Import from menu. The Bat! will automatically perform the import of the address book contacts.

If the email client that you previously used is missing from this list, you can then export your contacts in one of the following formats supported by The Bat!: .LDIF, vCard (business card), .CSV (comma-separated plain text), .TDF (tab-delimited plain text), .INI, .TXT (address list). Besides this, you can import contacts into The Bat! from X.509 Certificate. Use the File -> Import from menu to import contacts from these files.

To export contacts from The Bat! use the File -> Export to menu and select the needed format. If you need to export several contacts only, select them and choose the "Export selection" option.

1. Server address (you can find the CardDAV server address on the website of your email service)
2. User ID or Email
3. Password

Address history makes it easy to follow correspondence. The Bat! can automatically collect information about the correspondents you specify. To access the address history, switch to the Addresses folder tab under the account tree. 

When you switch to this tab for the first time The Bat! automatically opens the "Address History Setup" window. You can define from what category of messages – Incoming or outgoing – The Bat! will collect addresses. The program offers to scan the message base for initial set. Check the needed boxes, and click Next. 

Select the folders that should be scanned: 

After the scanning is finished, The Bat! will offer you either to track all correspondents or only those you have recently contacted. The time range can vary from one day to several months. If you change the time range you will notice that the number of contacts to track changes too.



After you click Next, you should specify the accounts for automatic address collection. You can change these settings later under the Options -> Preferences -> Address History menu. Click OK to finish setup.

You will now see the list of correspondents under the Addresses tab. Once you select a contact you will see the messages sent from or to him (depending on your settings) in the message list. The new incoming or outgoing messages will also be added to the address history. 

Later you can add new contacts to the address history using the Specials -> Add Sender to Address History menu. This menu item is available in the context menu as well. 

To delete a correspondent from address history, select it and press the Delete key. A confirmation dialog box will appear. If you do not want this contact to be added to the address history, enable the "Add a record to the Do-Not-Track List" option.

To configure address history use the Options -> Preferences -> Address History menu. You can access it directly from the Addresses tab, right-clicking the address history list area and selecting "Address Tracking settings" (Ctrl+F10).

You can change the settings you chose when you first configured address history. To add addresses that should not be tracked, click the "Do-Not-Track List" button. You can add exact addresses or addresses matching certain criteria here. It is possible to limit history by several months and purge exceeding entries from history on exit.