Both Google Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are making it easier to keep your online address book organized. This week, Google Contacts and Yahoo announced major updates, rolling out new features to automatically keep your contact lists up to date.
The first thing you’ll notice at Google Contacts is its new look and feel in the Material Design aesthetic. The service will immediately detect all your duplicate contacts on your first visit and ask if you’d like to consolidate them together. Each person’s contact card will contain the most recent conversations you’ve had, their contact info that you inputted yourself and details pulled from that person’s Google profile. If Uncle Jeff switches jobs and gets a new email address and phone number, your contact book will automatically update to reflect the now information.
Not to be left out, Yahoo! Mail users are also getting a similar new feature called contact cards. You can launch these new cards by mousing over a person’s name in a message or while composing an email. These contact cards will display information from your address book, as well as recent phone numbers pulled from Facebook profiles, Flickr profiles and information contained in emails. You’ll also be able to see the most recent email conversations you’ve had with that person.
These automatic contact information updates are all contingent on your social networking privacy settings. If you’ve chosen not to share your phone number with your Facebook friends, they won’t be able to access this information through Yahoo contact cards. If, however, your phone number is publicly available on Facebook, anyone who emails you will be able to get your phone number as well. This would definitely be a good time to review your social network privacy settings to make sure you’re only sharing what you want to share.
The new Google Contacts is coming to Gmail “over the next few weeks.” You can get a preview of the service by visiting contacts.google.com/preview. Yahoo contact cards are “gradually rolling out to desktop users in the U.S.” For more information, visit the official Gmail blog and official Yahoo Tumblr blog, respectively.
[Image credit: Google, Yahoo]
From Mike on January 07, 2017 :: 4:09 pm
Sorry but that is not true. I am NOT on social media and yet Yahoo is just outright giving my phone number and other details through their contact cards feature to any recipient I email regardless if it’s the first time I’ve ever emailed them or not. I ran a test using a completely new email to prove this. And with it automatically updating whenever you change your number, talk about a way for stalkers to stay on top of their prey. This is a privacy problem in so many ways and should be done away with. It’s no wonder there was a data breach at Yahoo recently.
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