CWU BlackBerry Help: Tips & Tricks

Everytime you send, reply, or forward an e-mail, that address gets saved into your Frequent Contacts address book in GroupWise. As this address book can get cluttered with old emails, slowing down the search process, it's a good idea to either go through and manually clean it out or have it do so automatically. It's especially a good idea to clean out your Frequent Contacts if your BlackBerry device is synched with that address book.

Manual Clean

You can view your Frequent Contacts address book by date of last contact and/or reference count (how many times you've used that address) to help you quickly sort through those addresses you want to keep, and those you want to get rid of. Unfortunately, this option of adding fields works only on the PC, not the Mac version of GroupWise.

From the main GroupWise window,

• Click on the Address Book button on the toolbar (or click on the Tools menu, then Address Book)

The Address Book appears.

In the left pane is a list of books that you have access to, including the following: Novell GroupWise Address Book, one with your name on it, and Frequent Contacts.

• Click on Frequent Contacts.

The contents of your Frequent Contents address book displays in the right pane of the window.

In the sample screen above, the columns are Name, E-Mail Address, Office Phone, and Department.

To add the Last Reference and Reference Count columns so we can see when the last time contact was made with that address and how many times we made contact,

• Click on Edit, Columns, and select More Columns

• In the left pane, scroll until you locate the Last Reference option, then click on the Add button.
• Locate the Reference Count option and Add that as well.
• Click OK

The two new colunms are now showing in the right pane of the window. You may need to scroll to the right a bit to see them. To make the sorting process easier, you may want to temporarily get rid of all columns except the Name, E-mail address, and then the two new Last Reference, and Reference columns. You can do this by clicking and dragging them off of the column header (as soon as you release the mouse button, the box will disappear).

To sort by Last Reference,

• Click on Edit, Sort

• Locate the Last Reference option in the white pane
• Select Sort all Ascending
• Click OK

Now all of your contacts are in order by date with the most recent at the bottom.

• Select the contacts you want to get rid of (hint: do a multiple select by clicking on the first contact, scrolling down to the last one, press the Shift key and click on the last one - that will highlight the whole block) and tap the delete key on your keyboard.

To sort by Reference Count,

• Click on Edit, Sort
• In the Sort window that appears, locate Reference Count and click on it.
• Click on Sort all Ascending
• Click OK

Now all of your contacts are sorted by how often you e-mail them.

It's probably a safe bet that any "1"s can be deleted, especially if you haven't e-mailed them in a year or two.

Automatic clean

You can also set up GroupWise to automatically clean out old addresses.

From the main GroupWise window,

• Click on Tools, Address Book (or click on the Address Book button on the toolbar)
• Right-click on the Frequent Contacts address book in the left pane of the window and select Properties.
• Click on the Options tab.

At the bottom of this screen is the option to Delete addresses not referenced within time period... and you can set the time period to whatever you want. Probably if you haven't used an email address in 6 months or more, you don't need it in your address book.

After you've set up your time period,

• Click the Delete Now button.

All old contacts are removed.

• Click OK to close the window.

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Page last updated 04/24/07. Send questions or comments to blackberry@cwu.edu.