Combining contacts

Most people have more than one email address — a personal Gmail, a work address, an old hotmail account they refuse to retire. By default Saymail treats every address as a separate contact record, which means the same person can appear two or three times in autocomplete and the contacts panel.

Combining merges those records into a single contact that holds every email address. After combining, the person shows up exactly once in the list, autocomplete shows all their addresses, and conversations across addresses surface under the same name.

How to combine

1. Open the Contacts panel from the command palette or panel menu.
2. Select the contacts you want to merge. Hold Ctrl/Cmd to click multiple. Hold Shift to select a range.
3. Click Combine in the panel toolbar.
4. A confirmation dialog appears: “Combine N contacts? The first-selected contact will be kept; the others will have their email addresses merged into it and will be deleted.”
5. Click Combine to proceed, or Cancel to back out.

The first contact you selected becomes the primary — its display name, photo, and notes are kept. The other selected contacts (the secondaries) hand their email addresses to the primary and are deleted.

If you want a specific contact to “win”, click that one first.

What actually happens

• Every email address attached to a secondary contact is moved to the primary contact. Duplicates (an address that’s already on the primary) are skipped, not duplicated.
• The secondary contacts are deleted from your local database.
• Past emails stay attached to their email addresses, so combining doesn’t lose any conversation history — but those conversations now show under the primary contact’s name.

Why combine

• Cleaner autocomplete. Three matches for “Anna” collapse into one entry with all her addresses behind it.
• Unified history. Click the combined contact and you see every conversation, regardless of which address the person used.
• Better classification context. When the LLM looks at the contact attached to an email, it sees one person with a consistent history instead of three strangers.

When NOT to combine

• Different people with similar names. Two coworkers named “Chris” who happen to email you about the same topic are not the same person. Combining is irreversible — double-check the email addresses before confirming.
• Personal vs. company aliases when you need them separate. If you bill accounts@theircompany.com separately from chris@theircompany.com, keeping them as distinct contacts is intentional.

Reversibility

The action cannot be undone. Combining permanently deletes the secondary contacts. To split a combined contact back apart you’d have to manually re-create the deleted records. Take a moment before clicking Combine to make sure you’re merging the right people.

What about provider-synced contacts?

Contacts synced from a provider sync one-way only. If you combine a synced contact with another contact, the merge applies locally — but the next sync round may re-create the deleted secondary if it still exists on the provider side. To make the merge stick, also merge the duplicates in Google Contacts or Outlook People; the next sync then matches Saymail’s view of the world.