Contacts¶
Behind every message is a person. The Contacts page (in the sidebar) is a person-centric, cross-channel view: one contact, all their addresses and handles, their structured details, and their full conversation history in one place — no matter which channel a message came in on.
Contacts are built on the single contact kind in memory. The same person you
email, message on Signal and chat with on Matrix is one record, not one per channel.
Most contacts are created automatically as messages arrive — see
Inbox & contacts for how messages flow in and get triaged.
The contacts list¶
Open Contacts from the sidebar to see everyone you correspond with, sorted by name. Each row shows:
- the person's name (with an avatar built from their initials),
- small channel icons for the channels they reach you on, and
- a badge with the number of still-open messages from them, if any.
The list is read-only and automatic: contacts appear here once they have at least one contact method on file, which normally happens the first time a message from them is triaged. Click a row to open the contact.
Note
There is no "new contact" button. People are created from incoming messages. You can fully edit a contact once it exists — including adding contact methods for channels they haven't written from yet.
The contact card¶
A contact's detail view is laid out as an address-book card:
- an identity header — avatar, name, the channels they use, the message count and when you last heard from them;
- Details — the structured fields below;
- Notes — free text you keep about the person;
- Contact methods — every channel handle linked to them;
- What the assistant knows — facts the agent has learned (read-only);
- Addresses — one or more postal addresses;
- History — the cross-channel conversation timeline.
Click Edit in the top bar to change the name, notes, details, addresses and contact methods, then Save (or Cancel to discard). Editing also reveals the Delete contact button at the bottom.
Structured details¶
The Details card holds the contact's structured fields. In view mode only the fields you have filled in are shown; in edit mode you get an input for each.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
Birthday |
Date picker; shown formatted to your locale. |
Company |
Free text. |
Role |
Free text (e.g. job title). |
Website |
Free text; rendered as a clickable link (https:// is added if you omit it). |
Note
Phone and postal address are not detail fields. A phone number is a contact
method (a phone channel handle — see below), and addresses live in their own
multi-value Addresses card.
Notes¶
The Notes card is free-form text about the person — context, preferences, anything you want to keep. Clearing the box and saving removes the note.
Addresses¶
A contact can have several postal addresses. In edit mode each address is a text box you can remove with the ✕ button, and Add address appends a new one. Empty entries are dropped when you save.
Contact methods (across channels)¶
The Contact methods card lists every channel handle linked to the person — their email address, phone number, Signal/WhatsApp/Matrix/Zulip handle, and so on. Each row shows the channel icon, the identifier, and the channel name.
These are what tie messages from different channels to the same person. The supported channels are:
| Channel | Used for |
|---|---|
Email |
Email address |
Phone |
Phone number |
Signal |
Signal account |
WhatsApp |
WhatsApp account |
Matrix |
Matrix ID |
Zulip |
Zulip sender |
Adding and removing methods¶
In edit mode:
- Add a method by picking a channel, typing the address or handle, and pressing Add (or Enter).
- Remove a method with the ✕ next to it.
Adding a contact method is how you tell the agent "this handle is also this person" — linking, say, a newly-discovered phone number or Signal account to someone you already email. From then on, messages arriving on that handle are attributed to this contact and join their history.
Note
Contacts are matched to incoming senders automatically by an exact handle match first, then by a shared email address across channels, and only as a last resort by an exact name (and never for generic names like "support" or "info"). Adding a method by hand is the reliable way to unify channels the automatic matching wouldn't connect on its own.
Merging duplicate contacts¶
If the same person ends up as two separate contacts — for example because they wrote from two addresses before you linked them — you can fold one into the other.
- Open the contact you want to keep.
- Click Merge in the top bar.
- Pick the other contact to merge into this one.
The merge moves the other contact's contact methods and its entire message history onto the contact you kept, and merges the underlying memory records too — so all the learned facts come along. The better human name and the more recent activity are preserved. The merged-away contact disappears from the list.
Warning
Merge is directional: the contact you open is the target that survives; the one you pick is folded into it and removed. There is no separate "unmerge" button, so pick the keeper first.
Conversation history¶
The History card is the contact's unified timeline across every channel. Each entry shows the channel icon, the subject or sender, the date, and the message's inbox status (New, Needs reply, Answered, Seen), with the summary underneath when one is available.
This is the same triaged message data you see in the Inbox — here it's filtered to a single person and merged across all their channels, so an email thread and a Signal chat with the same person sit side by side in one list.
Link to the person's memory¶
A contact is the person's memory entity — there is no separate copy. The
contact you see and its kind=contact graph node are the same record, so anything the
agent learns about the person attaches directly to the contact.
Two things follow from this:
- What the assistant knows — when the agent has learned facts about the person beyond the address-book details (what they prefer, what they work on, who they work for, skills, memberships…), they appear in a read-only card on the contact. The structured details (company, role, website, birthday) are not repeated here; they live in the Details card instead.
- View in memory — the button in the top bar jumps straight to this person's entity on the Knowledge page, where you can see their full graph, history over time, and corrections. See Memory & entities for what that page offers.
Deleting a contact¶
In edit mode, Delete contact removes the contact (and confirms first). The person's messages are kept — they simply lose the link to the deleted contact. The contact's contact methods and learned facts are removed along with the record.