How recent contacts works

The following article appeared on the Lotus developers Web Blog.  It gives you a really good idea how recent contacts works.  If you don't know what recent contacts are, open your Notes address book and the 1st heading you will see is recent contacts.

Here are some details  on how Recent contacts works. Think of it more like "Frequent Contacts."

Philippe encounters "Recent Contacts" in 2 ways:
1. The order of names he sees in his type-ahead when he addresses email
2. in his "Recent Contacts" view in his personal contacts (Address book)

After he sends an e-mail or closes an e-mail after reading it, Notes stores the sender's or recipients' information and uses it to determine the order for his type-ahead drop-down. Contacts that he sends or receives e-mail from more frequently will appear higher on the type-ahead drop-down list. If he saves his chat transcripts to his mailfile, then the names of those people are added when he saves the chat.

This means that if he sends one mail to "John Banks" today, but that yesterday he sent 10 mails to "John Lance", that John Lance will appear higher in the list, as shown in the screenshot below (even tho the John Banks was actually more recent.)

We agonized of wording (and how the feature actually worked etc)  and started with "Recent Contacts"  -- I wish we'd gone with "Frequent contacts" but I don't think it's worth the cost of changing (and translating) at this point, because (I hope at least) that in many cases, if someone is frequent enough, then they are also "recent" and the details of all of this are transparent to folks like Philippe.

Anyway, the maximum number of people that Philippe can have in his Recent Contacts is 3000. His administrator can change the maximum number of contacts allowed with the Notes.ini  DPAB_MAX_DIP_TABLE_SIZE=1

How's that for a completely cryptic ini variable! Let me explain:

DPAB,or “Dynamic Personal Address Book”, is a repository of recently seen high value contacts. It is represented in the use's Personal Contacts as Recent Contacts.

DIP,or “Dynamic Interest Profiler”, controls the weighting that determines the order of the type-ahead drop down list in Local Contacts and the Search Directory.  This weighting represents the user's relationship to a person.  It is based on the number of times the user sends and receives mail from that person, either as a To or CopyTo recipient. The DIP weighting is not visible to the user.

User Summary
The DPAB/DIP starts processing the names on unread mail when the mail is closed.  The DPAB/DIP does not process mail from the preview pane unless the user has selected to mark documents viewed in preview as READ.  The processing is also done when the user sends mail.

Processing is done in background queues so as to not disrupt the user.  It  collects the list of names and queues up that list for DIP weighting.

Next the names that are new to the DIP list are queued up to be added to the user's Recent Contacts. For each new recent contact, a new Recent Contact record is created. This record is created from the server contact when that can be found.  If it cannot be found, the Recent Contact record is still created but it  only contains the information that was available from the mail.  A special case is made for Groups.  The Group Recent Contact only contains a stub record with no members. It was felt that information in the Recent Contact group record was more likely to be obsolete than the content of a Person record.  The members of the group will be retrieved from the server copy of  the group record when they are needed.

The information in Recent Contacts is updated from the server contact information once every seven days.  

The Recent Contacts and their weighting value are used when creating the type-ahead drop down list. The names displayed in both the Local Contact type-ahead drop down and the Search Directory drop down are sorted by 'weight', and not alphabetically, either by first or last name.  Weight means how often a person or group has appeared in message address fields.