Unable to add contacts

Help
,
1

This has been discussed before so I know there are some posts discussing this but they are from last year and provide no solution for me.

Pretty much a copy and paste of another thread’s comment from this thread: Editable Contacts from IMAP Email Addresses

Description:

Cannot add a contact the button is greyed out and does nothing when pressed (making the application mostly useless for me at the moment)

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Connect an IMAP mail account and attempt to add a new contact

Expected Behavior:

I expect the ability to add a contact to the address book via contact management

Conclusion:

What’s going on here? How come we’re unable to do a simple task such as adding a contact with this app?

2 Likes
2

Mailspring doesn’t keep a local-only address book — contacts you create are written to your provider, so the New Contact button is only live when you’ve selected an account that has an editable address book on the server. Plain IMAP gives Mailspring mail only, no contacts API, so for that account you’ll just see Found in Mail (people you’ve corresponded with, which feeds autocomplete) and the button stays disabled with the tooltip “Select an account to add a contact.”

What makes an account editable:

  • Google accounts (via the People API — if you added the account years ago and it’s read-only, Preferences > Accounts > Re-authenticate grants the extra permission).
  • Any provider that offers CardDAV: iCloud, Fastmail, Yahoo, Posteo, Nextcloud and most hosted mail. Mailspring discovers this automatically for the account’s domain; when it finds an address book, an All Contacts entry appears under that account in the Contacts sidebar and you can add and edit there.

The answer to “why can’t I add a contact” is that your IMAP provider doesn’t expose an address book Mailspring can write to. If they offer CardDAV and it isn’t being picked up, open a separate thread with the provider name. More here: Managing your address book / contacts within Mailspring — Mailspring Documentation