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 + New button in the panel, or “Add to contacts” from an email).
• It was synced from a provider’s address book — Google Contacts or Outlook People — when you added the account.

Saymail stores extra information for contacts: display name, photo (if available), multiple email addresses, notes, the source. They’re the entries you’d expect from a real address book.

Provider contacts sync one-way only. Saymail reads contacts from Google and Microsoft, but never writes back. Edits you make in Saymail to a synced contact are local to Saymail; the next sync round may overwrite them with the provider’s version. To change a contact permanently, edit it in Google Contacts or Outlook People and let the sync pick the change up.

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.

A recipient becomes a contact the moment you save it (right-click → Add to contacts, or open the recipient and use the form). Until then it’s just a name + email pair.

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, email addresses, and (for contacts) notes. Results respect the active pill — search inside Recipients to find someone you’ve emailed but never saved.

When to promote a recipient to a contact

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

• You want to store extra info like a phone number, photo, or note.
• You want the contact to sync back to your phone — if you save it as a manual contact in Saymail it stays local, but if you save it in Google Contacts or Outlook People, the next provider sync pulls it into Saymail.
• 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.