What do you recommend for storing the many addresses we all have?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #58, I look at several solutions for managing contacts on your
computer.

Storing contacts

It depends. Gosh, it depends on how you use your computer, what kind of
addresses you’re talking about, what kinds of things you want to be able to do
with storing all this information. There’s just no answer. I don’t have a
specific recommendation.

I can tell you what I do, which is probably the closest I could come to
it.

Google contacts

In general, I use Google contacts. I use Gmail and the Google contacts page
to maintain my contacts and my information about my contacts.

Why? Well, in my case, it’s because:

1. I want to be able to access it from any computer that I’m on and;

2. I want to be able to access it from my mobile devices – and since I use
   Android phones, the Android operating system (which is a Google product)
   automatically synchronizes the contact list on my phone with what I have stored
   in my Google contacts in Gmail.

So, those are the kinds of things to look at.

Email clients

There are wonderful stand-alone programs for contact management. Most email programs, the ones that you would have installed on your desktop
like Thunderbird or Windows Live Mail or any of the others, have good contact
management tools built in.

Windows itself has a contact management tool built in (or maybe it’s now
part of Windows Live, I’m not sure). But that too is another viable solution to
this particular problem. In all cases, they all allow you to import and export
information to and from other contact management tools.

I will warn you that contact import and export is one of the weaknesses
across the board. It can be difficult. It can lose a little bit of the
information that is not strictly contact related, if you have comments or
random things that you’ve created for contacts.

Not all contact management solutions will actually import everything because
they don’t support those kinds of fields.

But by and large, there really isn’t a strong and specific recommendation
that I have for everybody. All I can say is that Google contacts and Gmail have
done very well for me.