This is awesome. I was using bbdb but got tired of it. I switched to the contacts method mentioned on the mailing list a time ago about just doing something like this (which is also the approx format you've used):

,-----

| * Category

| ** Name

|   :PROPERTIES:

|   :Phone: xxxxxxx

|   :Email: blah@blah.com

|   ...etc.

|   :END:

`-----

From skimming the website and org-contacts.el, is the main advantage that it can search multiple files as well as integrate with gnus? I don't use gnus (can't access personal email via pop/imap from behind work firewall) and so that feature isn't wholly attractive. It looks like I could use the remember template as well for my current method. Is there something else that you would put forth as the primary benefits of this system? I'm quite interested in it.

-- can you add additional fields? It looks like I could keep repeating the pattern in your .el like so:

,-----

`-----

-- I will often need to look up a contact at work and reproduce it in an email. It would be nice to standardize the order of the properties and then have a way to "export" the whole contact into the kill-ring for pasting into email format. Do you think something like that could be integrated? For example 'M-x export-selected-contact' would take the highlighted area and create:

,-----

| Name

| Title

| Company

| Email

| Phone

`-----

And perhaps one could define the fields for export (I wouldn't, for example, hardly ever need to export the address and my notes about the contact).

Just my thoughts! I was very excited to see this in my inbox and look around. I'm assuming with the right fields, my current system would already be in the right syntax to integrate with this, so I'm interested to hear your answers to the above.

Thanks for your work,

John