SOGo contacts and address book

SOGo doesn’t just give you mail and calendar — there’s also a full address book with CardDAV sync. Meaning: contacts you maintain in SOGo are also on your iPhone, Android, Mac and in your mail client — automatically.

Opening the address book

In SOGo, click the Address Books tab at the top.

By default you have:

• Personal Address Book: your own contacts
• Collected Addresses: every address you’ve ever written to (auto-collected)

You can create additional address books, say for private / work, or shared family address books.

Creating a new contact

In the address book, top: New → Contact. In the dialog:

• First name / last name
• Email addresses: as many as you like (private, work, old)
• Phone numbers: same
• Addresses (postal)
• Birthday (also syncs with the calendar, if you want)
• Notes
• Categories (for filtering)

Save. The contact appears in the list and is immediately available via address auto-completion when writing mail.

Creating contacts from an email

In the Mail tab: on an incoming mail, click the sender’s name → Add to address book. Fields come pre-filled, you can add more, save.

Handy when creating lots of new contacts from ongoing correspondence.

Groups / lists

You can bundle contacts into lists — e.g. “Board 2026”, “Customer newsletter”, “Family”.

Create a new list: in the address book, top: New → List:

• Set a name
• Add members (via auto-completion from your address books)

When writing a mail, you can then enter the list name as recipient — the mail goes to all members.

Careful: this is client-side in SOGo. When you write to the list, every recipient sees all the other recipients in the To or Cc field. For “real” hidden mailing lists (all recipients hidden from each other), better use BCC, or create a Mailcow alias with multiple targets — see Aliases and catchall.

Multiple address books

Defaults are “Personal” and “Collected”. Adding your own:

1. Address book list on the left → click +.
2. Set name + description.
3. Save.

When creating a new contact, you pick which address book it goes into. For auto-completion when writing mail, SOGo searches all address books.

Sharing address books

Same as with the calendar: right-click an address book → Properties → Sharing.

You can grant read or write access to other users of the same domain. The invited user sees the shared address book in addition to their own.

Handy for example in a club: a shared “Members” address book, every board member has write access, everyone else read.

Importing contacts

If you want to bring contacts over from Outlook, Apple Contacts, or another provider:

1. In the source system, export contacts as vCard (.vcf) — that’s the standard.
2. In SOGo: open the address book → Import at the top → upload the vCard file.
3. SOGo imports all contacts.

With large contact lists (1000+), the import can take 1–2 minutes.

Exporting from Apple Contacts: select all contacts → File → Export → Export vCard.

Exporting from Outlook: File → Import/Export → Export to a file → vCard.

Exporting from Gmail: contacts.google.com → Export → vCard.

Exporting contacts

If you want to pull SOGo contacts out of the system:

1. Open the address book → click Export at the top.
2. SOGo hands you a vCard file.

You can import it into any other system.

Sync to smartphone and mail clients

SOGo contacts are available via CardDAV. Server address:

https://mail.xaweho.de/SOGo/dav/<your-mail-address>/AddressBook/

Configuration per platform:

iOS / iPadOS

1. Settings → Contacts → Accounts → Add Account → Other → Add CardDAV Account.
2. Enter server, login (full mail address), password.
3. Set a description (e.g. “xaweho”).

Contacts sync both ways — new ones on the iPhone land in SOGo, new ones in SOGo appear on the iPhone.

Apple Contacts (macOS)

1. Apple Contacts → Settings → Accounts → +.
2. Choose Other CardDAV account.
3. Server, login, password.

Android

Via DAVx⁵ (free on F-Droid and Google Play). Create an account, enter server URL and login, sync contacts.

Thunderbird

With the CardBook extension or the built-in CardDAV (Thunderbird 102 and later):

1. Open the address book → File → New → External address book.
2. Select CardDAV → enter the URL.
3. Log in.

Outlook

Outlook doesn’t support CardDAV natively. The way in is the free CalDav Synchronizer plugin — besides calendars, it also syncs CardDAV address books. Create a synchronization profile in the plugin, enter the address book URL from above as the DAV URL; the login is your full mail address. Details are in Setting up Outlook (Windows).

From our experience: once set up, the sync runs stable — but the initial setup is more fiddly than with Thunderbird or Apple Contacts. If you’re not locked into Outlook, those two save you the plugin detour.

iOS: mail, calendar and contacts in one step

On iPhone and iPad you don’t have to create the CardDAV account by hand: our configuration profile (.mobileconfig) sets up IMAP/SMTP, CalDAV and CardDAV together — one download, all three services in.

How that works is in Setting up Apple Mail (iPhone/iPad).

Frequently asked questions

What are “Collected Addresses”? An address book into which SOGo automatically adds every address you’ve sent a mail to. Handy for auto-completion — even if you never officially created the contact, SOGo knows the address. Sometimes annoying: typo addresses land there too. You can disable auto-collection in the SOGo settings.

Do phone numbers show up as caller contacts on the iPhone? Yes. Contacts synced via CardDAV appear in the Contacts app and also on incoming calls — if the caller ID matches, iOS shows the name.

Can I add photos to contacts? Yes. In the contact editor, click the profile photo field → upload an image. It’s stored via vCard (photo field) and travels along to smartphone and mail client.

Are contacts encrypted? On the connection to SOGo: yes (HTTPS / TLS). On the server: stored unencrypted in the mailbox storage. End-to-end encrypted contact sync isn’t doable with standard CardDAV — you’d need a specialized solution like EteSync, which runs outside our setup.

How many contacts can SOGo handle? We’ve seen setups with 5,000+ contacts, no problem performance-wise. The first initial sync to a smartphone can take 5–15 minutes.

If I delete a contact on the iPhone, is it gone from SOGo too? With two-way CardDAV sync, yes. If you only want to read, you can set the account to read-only on the iPhone (remove the write-permission checkbox in the account settings).

Can I see birthdays in the calendar automatically? Yes. SOGo shows birthdays from contacts as all-day events in the calendar — if you enable that in the SOGo settings.

What’s next

• SOGo webmail — first login and overview
• SOGo calendar — events and sharing
• Setting up Apple Mail (iPhone/iPad)