Import your contacts from your mailbox

When you connect a personal Gmail or Outlook mailbox, Joinways builds your CRM from your own email: the people and companies you have written to over the last twelve months are created automatically, so you do not start from a blank page.

It happens once, right after the connection, without you asking for it. This article explains what is taken, what is left out, and what to do with the result.

What is imported

• The people you have written to, read from your sent mail over the last twelve months. Someone who only ever wrote to you is not imported, so newsletters, notifications and cold outreach stay out.
• The companies behind those people, derived from their email domain. Generic domains such as gmail.com or outlook.com create no company.
• Role addresses like noreply or mailer-daemon are skipped, and so is your own address.

Writing to someone is the signal used, because it is the one that means a real relationship. Receiving from them is not.

What Joinways keeps

The pass reads addresses, not correspondence: your sent messages are not stored, and their content is never shown to anyone. What is kept is the contact list it produces.

Those contacts and companies belong to the workspace, like every other record: your team sees them and can work on them. Each one is marked as coming from a mailbox, so an imported contact stays distinguishable from one you created by hand or loaded from a file.

When it runs

• Once per connection, just after you authorise Gmail or Outlook. It never runs a second time on its own, so it cannot pile up duplicates.
• Only on a personal mailbox connected by OAuth. A shared address that reaches Joinways by forwarding has no sent mail to read, so nothing is imported from it.
• If you would rather it did not run on your mailbox, ask us before connecting: there is no switch for it in the interface today.

💡 Several hundred contacts can appear at once. Give the list ten minutes after the first import: merge the obvious duplicates and delete what is clearly not a client, and your CRM starts clean.

Troubleshooting

No contact was created

Cause: the mailbox has little or no sent mail in the last twelve months, or it reaches Joinways by forwarding rather than OAuth. Solution: check the connection type; a forwarding address never feeds this import.

Contacts I never dealt with appeared

Cause: you wrote to them at some point, which is all the import looks at. Solution: delete them; the pass will not recreate them.

A contact has no company

Cause: their address is on a generic domain, which says nothing about where they work. Solution: attach the company by hand if it matters.

See also

• Connect Gmail
• Manage your contacts
• Manage your companies