If you’re a student or a faculty member at Missouri State, chances are you’ve wanted to lookup somebody’s email address (at the university) to shoot them an email. To do that, you typically turn to Missouri State’s website and do a people search. Did you know that you can use your Mac’s Address Book to do that lookup, as well as look up their email address right in Mail.app? Here’s how to do it.

First, open Address Book.app from /Applications. Pull up Address Book’s Preferences from the Address Book menu, or just use Command-, to get there. Click on the LDAP tab, and then click the + button. You’ll be greeted with the window shown here.

Fill in the values shown. Name is whatever you want to use to identify this lookup; Server is pds.missouristate.edu. Port should automatically be 389. The Search Base is CN=PDS,DC=MISSOURISTATE,DC=EDU (you can copy & paste this). Leave Authentication settings as they are. Click Save, and you’re good. Close the preferences window, and now you can go to Directories in Address Book’s Group sidebar, and type in your search in the search bar.

Once you have this set up in Address Book, you can then go into Mail.app (if you have it set up) and start a new email, and type in your search in the To: bar. You search results show in the drop down list that automatically shows up.

These settings can also be used to setup the Directory Server in Entourage if you set up your Bearmail account for Exchange, but that’s a slightly different animal that I won’t cover here (at least not at this time). Enjoy!