I recently switched from a PC to a Mac, and I’m not used to my email and contacts apps being separate, like Mail and Address Book are. Is there a quick way to pull contact information from an email and put it in Address Book, without a bunch of copying and pasting?

You’ve probably noticed that Mail can pull names and email addresses from Address Book when you’re composing a message. It’s almost as easy to send contact info from Mail to Address Book when you’re reading messages too—no copying and pasting required.

First, mouse over a name or email address in the From or To line of a message header—it’ll be highlighted in blue, with a white arrow to the right. Click that arrow for a menu, and choose Add To Address Book. Address Book will open in case you want to add more information to the contact’s card, or file the card in a group, but you can ignore the Address Book window for now and stay in Mail.

Now, what if the contact info you want isn’t in the header, but in the body of the email, or in the signature? No worries. Just mouse over a name, phone number, or email address, and Mail will draw a gray dotted line around it, with a gray arrow to the right. Click that arrow for a menu and select Create New Contact, or Add To Existing Contact. If you choose the latter, a pop-up window will appear showing Mail’s best guesses for what you want to add, and to which contact. If it guessed the wrong Address Book contact, just click the black arrow next to the name and choose the one you want. The rest of the information is in green, and you can click it to change or delete it, or adjust any of the drop-downs for the categories. When you’re satisfied, click the Add To Address Book button.