Managing Contacts

Contacts is the list of outside people and addresses that have emailed your assistant. It's where you decide who gets through — approve the senders you trust, ignore the ones you don't.

Open Contacts

Where contacts come from

Contacts are created automatically. The first time an external address emails your assistant, Deck adds a contact for it. There's no "add contact" button — the list mirrors who has actually reached out, so it's never a directory you have to maintain by hand.

Each contact carries the small details that help you place them:

• Avatar and name, with the email address underneath
• A status badge
• The subject and a short preview of their most recent email
• The date they last emailed

On large screens this is a table; on phones and tablets it becomes a card list.

The status tabs

Contacts are grouped into tabs, each with a count badge:

Tab	Who's here
All	Every sender Deck has seen.
Pending	Senders awaiting your decision.
Verified	Senders you've approved — their mail is processed.
Ignored	Senders you've blocked — their mail is skipped.

Counts refresh when you switch tabs and update on their own roughly once a minute.

Approving and ignoring senders

The actions on a contact depend on its current status:

• Pending → Approve (verify the sender) or Ignore (block them).
• Verified → Ignore to stop processing their mail.
• Ignored → Allow to move them back to pending.

When you act on a contact, it gently animates out of the current list and lands under the right tab.

Ignoring a sender stops their mail from being processed by your assistant going forward — it's a "don't bother with this one" switch, not a delete. You can always restore them later.

Sender policy and the labels you see

Your assistant has a sender policy that decides how new senders are treated by default, and the contact labels adapt to it:

• Allow all senders — pending contacts read as Allowed (mail flows through by default).
• Require approval — pending contacts read as Needs approval (mail waits until you say yes).

Change the policy from the Manage in Settings link, which opens your Email Assistant settings.

After you change the sender policy in Settings, the labels on the Contacts page may not relabel until you refresh the page.

Good to know

• No manual add. Contacts only appear from real inbound email — there's no way to type one in.
• Ignore, not delete. You can block a sender, but you can't remove a contact from the list.
• No search yet. You browse by status tab rather than searching by name or address.
• What's not shown here. Message counts, which projects a contact touches, and reply-side (outbound) verification don't appear on this page — Contacts is focused on who may reach your assistant.

Read next

• Using your Inbox — read the mail these contacts send.
• Set up your assistant — where the sender policy lives.

Common questions

Why is someone already in my Contacts that I never added?

Contacts are created automatically whenever a new address emails your assistant. Seeing a sender there just means they've reached out at least once.

If I ignore a sender, are their old emails deleted?

No. Ignoring only stops future mail from being processed. Anything already in your Inbox stays.

What's the difference between Verified and Allowed?

They reflect your sender policy. Under require approval, a sender you approve becomes Verified. Under allow all senders, new senders show as Allowed because they're let through by default.