The Contacts panel

The Contacts panel is the address book inside Saymail. Open it from the command palette or panel menu. The panel shows every person Saymail knows about, with a search box and three filter pills at the top: All, Contacts, and Recipients.

The distinction between contacts and recipients is small but important - it changes what gets shown and how the entry behaves.

Contacts vs. recipients

Contacts

A contact is an intentional address book entry. It comes from one of two places:

• You created it manually in Saymail (the Add button in the panel).
• It was synced from a provider’s address book - Google Contacts or Outlook People - when you added the account, or a matching provider entry promoted an existing recipient (see below).

Saymail stores a display name, one or more email addresses, and an optional free-text LLM description for each contact. There’s no stored photo or notes field - avatars you see next to a contact are looked up live (Gravatar or the sender’s favicon), opt-in, and never saved.

Provider contacts sync one-way only. Saymail reads contacts from Google and Microsoft, but never writes back. Once a contact exists in Saymail (whether you created it or a provider sync did), a later sync only adds account links to it - it won’t overwrite a display name you’ve already got locally. So edits you make in Saymail stick, even across future syncs.

Recipients

A recipient is someone Saymail noticed in an email header - either you wrote to them, or they wrote to you - but isn’t in your address book. Saymail extracts these automatically as it syncs mail. They give you autocomplete and search coverage for everyone you’ve corresponded with without forcing you to maintain a real address book entry.

There’s no right-click “add to contacts” action, and editing a recipient’s name doesn’t promote it either - a recipient’s address only turns into a contact when a provider address-book sync (Google Contacts or Outlook People) matches that same address. If you want a permanent contact for someone who’s currently just a recipient, create one yourself with Add in the panel and add their email address to it.

All

The All pill shows both contacts and recipients in one list. It’s the most useful filter for “who did I email about this?” - Saymail finds the person whether or not you formally saved them as a contact.

Switching pills is just a view filter. Nothing is deleted or moved; pills change what’s visible in the list, not what’s stored.

Searching

The search box matches against names and email addresses. Results respect the active pill - search inside Recipients to find someone you’ve emailed but never saved.

When to create a contact for a recipient

You don’t have to. Saymail works fine treating recipients as transient. But creating one makes sense when:

• You want to store extra info, like an LLM description the classifier can use as context.
• You want the contact to sync back to your phone - save the person in Google Contacts or Outlook People, and the next provider sync pulls them into Saymail as a contact automatically.
• You plan to combine several email addresses for the same person under one contact record.

Related

• Combining contacts - merge duplicate entries for the same person.