Contacts

Every command and flag is in the proton contacts reference. This page is the things people actually do.

REF is a contact ID, a name, or an email address.

The address book

proton contacts list --keyword jane --sort email
proton contacts get jane
proton contacts create --name "Jane Roe" --email jane@example.com --phone "+43 1 234567"
proton contacts update jane --email jane@newdomain.com
proton contacts delete jane

--email and --phone are repeatable. On update they replace the existing values rather than adding to them.

Fields

Every field takes the same flag on create and update:

proton contacts create --name "Jane Roe" \
  --first-name Jane --last-name Roe --nickname Janey \
  --email work:jane@acme.com --email home:jane@example.com \
  --phone cell:+43123456 --address home:"1 Example St, Vienna" \
  --organization Acme --job-title Engineer --birthday 1990-01-31 \
  --language de-AT --timezone Europe/Vienna --note "Likes tea"

--email, --phone, --address and --website are repeatable and may say what kind they are, the way Proton’s own editor offers one on each. A bare value states no kind, which vCard distinguishes from other.

Field	Kinds
--email · --address · --website	home, work, other
--phone	home, work, other, cell, main, fax, pager

A word before the colon that is not one of these is part of the value, so --website https://example.com keeps its scheme.

Groups

Proton groups addresses, not people, so a colleague’s work address can be in the team group while their personal one is not.

proton contacts groups create --name Team --color "#8080FF"
proton contacts groups get Team                               # and who is in it
proton contacts groups add Team jane                          # all of Jane's addresses
proton contacts groups add Team jane --email jane@acme.com    # only that one
proton contacts groups remove Team jane

With --email, exactly one contact may be named - which address belongs to whom is a question only one contact can answer.

A listing of groups cannot say who is in one, because Proton keeps membership on the address rather than on the group. get is what asks the addresses.

Merge duplicates

proton contacts merge --dry-run    # what it would fold, and into what
proton contacts merge

Two entries reachable at the same address are one person; two merely sharing a name are not, since people are routinely called the same thing. Addresses are compared case-insensitively.

The oldest of each set is kept, so a group or a pinned key that refers to it still does. Everything the others had is added, and nothing it already had is overwritten.

Import and export

proton contacts export --output-dir ./address-book     # one .vcf per contact
proton contacts export --output - > contacts.vcf       # one file, all of them
proton contacts import contacts.vcf

A property this tool has no flag for still travels. The stored card goes out and comes back whole, so an anniversary, a photo or a second postal address survives a round trip even though no flag sets one.

An import is addressed by UID. A card carries the UID of the contact it is, so reading a file back changes that contact rather than making a second one: export, edit, import, and the address book says what the file says. A card with no name and no address is skipped and named; the rest still land.

Pinned keys

Pinning a public key to a contact means mail to that address is encrypted to the key you trust, not just whatever the server hands back.

proton contacts keys pin jane --key jane-pubkey.asc
proton contacts keys pin jane --email jane@example.com --key -    # armored key on stdin
proton contacts keys pin jane --key jane.asc --no-encrypt         # pin for verification only
proton contacts keys unpin jane

--email picks which of the contact’s addresses the key applies to when there are several. --scheme is pgp-mime by default, or pgp-inline.