A company called Evercontact has just launched a new app that allows you to automatically update your iPhone’s address book with new contact information extracted from email signature lines. The service had previously been available for Gmail, Outlook, Chrome, plus CRM solutions from Salesforce, Highrise, Connectwise, Zoho and more.
Disclosure: I’ve been a paying user of Evercontact for Gmail for some time. It’s a handy set-it-and-forget-it tool that lets me avoid the hassle of managing and updating my Google Contacts.
Online, you get started with Evercontact by authenticating with your Google account, and then the service works silently in the background, analyzing and detecting the contact information found in your incoming email. It uses this information to update your address book entries with things like name changes, new tiles, jobs, email addresses, phone numbers, faxes, addresses and more.
You can also optionally buy a feature called “Flashback” that will scan your past email from 1 to 5 years back to update contact information for those entries you never had time to deal with before. (Disclosure: I bought this too.)
Now, the same service has come to iOS.
Here, Evercontact’s technology works much has it did before, but users have a bit more visibility into the changes it’s suggesting. The simple app will continue to scan your incoming email, and lets you approve all the changes before saving. While iOS itself offers some basic functionality that lets you tap to add email contacts to your address book, Evercontact is able to parse more information – basically, it can read anything that’s contained in the email signature, including social media profiles. It can even automatically internationalize phone numbers and link with contacts on LinkedIn.
The app is similar to one we came across just last week called ContactSaver, which does much of the same thing, and is focused on allowing users to manually approve the updates. Similarly, Evercontact is also focused on those who want more control over when or if their address books are updated.
ContactSaver is currently a free service with plans to charge for CRM integrations, but Evercontact only offers a free, 30-day trial. Afterwards, it’s $59/year for the premium plan which includes unlimited address book updates, or $149/year for the CRM plan which updates both your address book and CRM solution. (Team discounts are available.) The Flashback service is also available.
While both apps are a lot alike, Evercontact’s support for Flashback makes it a more robust option. It also offers personalized alerts for new contact information (sent via email or push notification), support for multiple email accounts, and the ability to share contact information back with new contacts by sending them an “AddMe” link.
As a longtime Evercontact user myself, and one who’s happy not having to think about this sort of thing, I’m not in need of the mobile app. But for those who primarily work on their iPhone or iPad, or need to see address book changes in advance, Evercontact for iOS is worth checking out.
Evercontact is not necessarily a “sexy” application, but it’s incredibly practical. Since its debut, the service has scanned over a billion emails and updated over 300 million contacts for its “tens of thousands” of (paying!) end users. The company estimates that, by doing so, it has saved users 1 million+ hours of work over the past three years. Seriously, thank you.
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