Contacts

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Read this first: there is no importer

Nothing in Ruber reads a vCard, speaks CardDAV, or takes a CSV, and nothing writes one out. An address book you keep elsewhere stays elsewhere. It is the first thing worth knowing and the most likely reason Contacts will not suit you yet, so it is at the top rather than in a footnote. The partial answer is below: the address book fills itself in from people you already write to, so it is less empty than it sounds.

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The record

Names are stored in parts rather than as one string with a space in it: given, middle, family, plus a nickname and pronouns. Somebody with two family names, or a name that does not split the way English expects, is stored correctly rather than nearly. Alongside that: several email addresses and several phone numbers, each labelled; postal addresses; organisation and job title; a birthday; free-text notes; and your own custom fields for whatever the form did not anticipate. Phone numbers are formatted for the country they belong to. You can set the dial code Ruber assumes so the common case needs no thought.

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History, computed from your own mail

Every contact carries seven figures: 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 and nothing else. The trade is honest: someone you have never emailed has no history at all. Most address books fill that gap by asking a third party who the person is. This one does not, and the blank is the shape of that decision.

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The address book fills itself in

People you correspond with regularly appear without being added, derived from the same index. An address book that holds only what you remembered to type is one you stop trusting after a month.

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Groups, stars and photos

Groups carry a colour, so a list you use daily is recognisable before you have read it. Star the handful you actually reach for. A photo is stored in your own object storage and served through the app rather than a public bucket URL — a contact photo is not a link that anyone who guesses it can open. Photos need object storage configured; without it, everything else about the contact works.

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Birthdays

Store a birthday and Ruber can remind you. Like the other reminders in the product, delivery depends on the background job runner being connected on your deployment — so confirm one arrives before trusting it with March.

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Settings

Sort order, what the second line of a row shows, whether opening a contact jumps straight to the first entry, and the assumed dial code. Set once; every device follows.

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What contacts do not do

No import and no export. Covered at the top, and repeated here because it is the one that decides whether this fits. No shared team directory. Contacts are yours. There are no per-contact permissions and no way to hand a list to a colleague; groups organise your own address book, not somebody else’s. No history before your first message. The direct cost of not looking anybody up.