A contact is an email identity without a login. It is how SAQ knows that mail from ola@nordic-retail.example comes from someone at the client Nordic Retail, and it is how a person who never logs in can still take part in a ticket by email. Contacts are managed by Owners and Admins under Clients → Contacts, with an email and a name. Associating a contact with a client grants no access to anything.
How it relates to other concepts
- A contact is not a client user. A client user can log in; a contact only sends and receives email. Adding a login to the address later means adding a client user.
- When a message arrives in the Inbox, a known contact is shown as "The sender is a known contact of {client}", which helps the person triaging choose the right project and billing client.
- A contact can be designated a billing recipient for a client, or for one project of that client, and then receives the client timesheets that billing runs produce.
- On a ticket, a contact takes part in the Shared comment audience by email.
Rules
- When someone triages or merges a message, they can put the sender on the ticket: a person with a login becomes a viewer, a contact without one may reply in the Shared audience and receives Shared comments by email. Unverified senders cannot be added.
- Contacts receive email for Shared comments on the tickets they correspond on, and nothing else.
- Contacts do not take a seat and are never counted as users.
- Removing a contact stops matching mail from that address to the client through this contact, and removes its billing-recipient designations. The comments it sent stay, attributed to "Former contact N".
Example
Nordic Retail's accounts payable mailbox, invoices@nordic-retail.example, never needs to open SAQ. Acme adds it as a contact and designates it a billing recipient, so every monthly timesheet goes there automatically.