The Contacts screen
The list of everyone who writes to your account. Every box, column and button on the screen, one by one.
Last updated: September 30, 2026
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The list of everyone who writes to your account. Every box, column and button on the screen, one by one.
Last updated: September 30, 2026
After a few months, "who was that woman who asked about prices last week?" becomes an unanswerable question buried in your inbox. The Contacts screen ends that: it gathers everyone who has written to your account into one list, lets you find a person in seconds, and lets you mark hundreds of people in a single move. This guide walks through every box, column and button on the screen.
💡 The Contacts section can be switched off by your portfolio's access policy. When it is off, the section is not in the side menu and typing the address by hand will not open it either. If your role's contact scope is set to your own conversations only, the list shows only the customers of conversations assigned to you. Details: Access and visibility policy.
In this article you will find:
Click Contacts in the side menu. On a phone you can also reach it from the Conversations / Contacts strip above the inbox; on desktop that strip is not drawn, because both entries already sit in the side menu.
At the top of the page sits the title, and under it a one-line summary that tells you how many contacts there are and what this list is. That number is the count after filtering: pick a tag and the number drops with it.
To the right of the title there are two buttons (on desktop):
Both depend on permissions: selection mode needs edit or delete rights, and Download CSV appears only for the owner and administrators.
The search box sits right under the title and reads Name, username, phone…. It works live: shortly after you stop typing, the list narrows by itself. There is no "Search" button to press.
Search covers four fields at once: name, username, phone and e-mail. Case does not matter. It matches anywhere in the value, so typing ann finds both "Anna Fischer" and "Joanne Clark".
The cross at the right edge of the box clears the search. Your search is kept in the address bar, so you can copy the address of the list you found and send it to a colleague — they will see the same list.
⚠️ Note: Search does not look inside message text; it only looks at the contact's details. To find a word inside a conversation, use the inbox search instead. See Searching conversations and messages.
Next to the search box sits the Filters button. When filters are applied, a small number badge appears on it; that number counts the filters other than search.
On a phone, tapping the button shows the filters in a layer that slides up from the bottom; the rest of the screen does not shift, and the layer closes when you tap the background or press Esc. On desktop the filters are already open inline and the button is not drawn.
Inside the panel there are five dropdowns, an Apply button and (if you have permission) the segment-saving box. Each filter is explained one by one in its own article: Searching and filtering contacts.
Once a filter is applied, a Clear filters link appears in the panel. That link removes the filters but keeps the text in the search box, so you do not have to type your keyword again.
Below the filter panel your saved filters sit on a single line. The strip begins with the word Segments; on a phone it scrolls sideways instead of wrapping.
Clicking a segment's name applies that combination of filters. The cross beside the name deletes the segment and asks for confirmation first. If you have not saved any segments, the strip is not drawn at all.
How to build, name and limit segments: Segments.
The list shows four columns, one of them conditional:
The list is sorted by the last incoming message: whoever wrote most recently sits at the top. People who never wrote sit at the end, ordered from the newest record backwards. There is no clickable column header that changes the sort.
While selection mode is on, a marker column appears at the right end of each row and tapping the row selects the person.
Pressing Select contacts puts the screen into selection mode: tapping rows marks people, links inside rows no longer navigate, and a sticky action bar appears at the bottom of the page. The bar shows how many people you selected; you can add and remove tags, and delete the selected people if you have the right.
A selection only covers the page currently on screen. When you change page, or when a search narrows the list, rows that leave the screen drop out of the selection. There is also a separate option that covers everyone matching the filter, and it works for tagging only. Details: Bulk actions on contacts.
Download CSV downloads your contacts as a file containing name, username, phone, e-mail, channel, account, tags, last message and first contact columns. The file does not apply the filter on screen: it contains every contact you are allowed to see. Details: Exporting contacts to CSV.
Numbered paging sits under the list. On the left there is a status line such as "Page 2 of 9", and on the right arrow buttons and page numbers. On long lists you see the first page, the last page and the pages around the one you are on; the numbers in between are shortened with an ellipsis.
How many contacts fit on a page comes from the panel's general list setting; there is no separate setting for contacts. When everything fits on one page, paging is not drawn at all.
Changing the search sends you back to page one automatically; otherwise a search made while sitting on page nine would show an empty page.
The screen has two different empty states and they say different things:
Do not read the second message as "my contacts have been deleted"; a forgotten filter in the address bar is usually reason enough.
On a phone the screen becomes a single column in this order: the Conversations / Contacts tabs (with the Select and CSV buttons on the right), the title, the search box and the Filters button on one row, the segment strip, the list, and paging.
Rows carry the same information on a phone; long strings of tags wrap onto the next line. The selection bar is not pinned to the bottom of the screen — it sticks to the page, so it never covers the last rows of the list and you can still tap them. On a phone the bar's actions are folded under an Actions heading.
If something on this screen does not behave as you expect, see I cannot find a contact in the list or get in touch with our Support team.
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