Recently a contact of mine (Hi, Tom!) mentioned he was having issues figuring out how to add contacts in his mail program. I asked him what program he used and he told me he was using Apple Mail.

If you don’t know, Apple Mail is the built-in mail program that Macintosh computers come with. There’s also a mobile version on iphones and ipads. The icon looks like this.

Now, I do have a macbook (apple laptop) but it is about 10 years old which makes it a dinosaur in Apple terms. The few times I’ve needed to have it serviced, the tech has made it very clear that I should just upgrade. But, until this bad boy quits working completely, we’re going to keep trucking.

That being said, my version of the mail app and my controls might be slightly different than on your machine, but the ideas are the same.

I personally don’t use Apple Mail for email. I have a Gmail account and always just log on to the Gmail website for email purposes. So, when Tom mentioned having trouble with adding contacts, I had to do some investigating.

So I opened the program and signed in to my Gmail account. I’ll be honest. I was stumped at first. There was no obvious ‘contacts’ button, and I couldn’t find anything in any of the menus.

However, if I started to write a new email, certain often-messaged people would pop up as a suggestion when I started typing an email address. But not all, so I knew it wasn’t pulling directly from my Gmail contacts.

Turns out, Apple hasn’t created a Contacts section within Apple Mail. But that doesn’t mean you can’t access saved contacts from within Apple Mail. You’ll just need to utilize the Contacts app that is also built in to your Mac.

Let’s see this in action.

First, let’s try to email someone in Apple Mail who we haven’t emailed before from Apple Mail.

I’m going to try to email my boss, Scott.

I opened a new email message and typed in ‘Scott’ in the ‘to’ field. Yet, nothing happened. Apple Mail didn’t suggest anything for his email address. This tells me Scott is not in my contacts list. Let’s add him.

First, go ahead and open your Contacts app. If you don’t know where it is, you can use the spotlight search on your Mac. Mine is at the very top right of my screen by my battery percentage. It looks like a magnifying glass.

Click the magnifying glass and type in ‘Contacts’ in the search bar that appears on your screen.

Go ahead and double click the result for Contacts to open the app.

The Contacts app should open and look something like the above image. To check, I wanted to see if Scott was in my Contacts app. I scrolled through my list and he was not there. Time to add him.

To add a contact, you can click the plus sign that is bottom-center of the contact app window.

I want to add a new contact so I’ll click the first option in the list.

From here, I’ll add any contact info I have for Scott, then I’ll click ‘Done’ at the bottom of the window.

Once I’m done, I want to double check that Scott was added to my contact list, so I scrolled down to check. He’s there at the bottom.

Now, I can close my contacts app or leave it open. It doesn’t matter. But I’m going to go back into Apple Mail and try to send Scott an email. Let’s start a new message and type the first part of his name and see what happens.

Apple Mail now recognizes Scott as a contact and provides a suggestion fo the rest of his email address!

From now on, if I want to email Scott I won’t need to remember his email address. He’s in my contacts and Apple Mail will remember.