Add contacts by forwarding an email

When someone you want in your address book emails you, forward the email to your private ContactZapp address. We read the sender's signature and add the sender as a contact in the account you forwarded it from. This page doesn't cover adding a contact by hand.

Before you start

• Forward from one of your two-way accounts. We don't add contacts from a read-only account or from any other address. See Set an account to read-only.
• Send the email from the same address as that account.

Find your address

1. Open your account menu and tap Settings. Then tap Add by email.
2. Under Your private address, copy the address. Its copy button reads Copy your private address.

The Shared address is there too, with Copy the shared address. The private address is the one to use. Only you have it, and every email sent to it shows up in Forwarded emails, even one we can't accept.

Who can send lists the accounts you can forward from. If none of your accounts is two-way, it says so. Make an account two-way in Accounts first.

If the screen says "Adding contacts by email isn't available yet.", no address is shown.

Add a contact

1. In your email app, open the email from the person you want to add.
2. Forward it to your private address, from one of the accounts under Who can send.
3. We use the signature of the person who sent the email. Forward one email with one person's signature.

What happens next

We add the sender as a contact in the account you forwarded from. The contact gets the label Added by email. If you already had the contact, we add the new details to it instead. We send an email reply that names the contact, with links to open it and to Not right? Tell us or undo it. The contact is also sent to your other accounts.

What happens to the email itself

We only process a forwarded email for the time needed to read the contact's details. After that, we delete the email. The list below shows what happened to each email, not the email.

See what happened to each email

1. Open Settings, then Add by email.
2. Tap See forwarded emails.

Forwarded emails shows what happened to each email, newest first. Each row has a badge, Added, Added to a contact or Not added, with the date. A row shows the account you forwarded from, then the contact's name or the reason it wasn't added. Tap Open the contact to see the contact.

Rows older than 90 days are removed.

The same page shows "No forwarded emails yet" until you forward one. Forward any email to your address to test the setup.

This month on the Add by email screen shows how many emails you've used. Only emails we read count.

If something looks wrong

Tap Not right? on a row, or the link in our reply. The page says what we did.

• Undo. Tap Undo, then confirm. For a new contact, it moves to Deleted in all your accounts, and you can restore it from Deleted. For details we added to a contact you had, the contact goes back to how it was before that date, in all your accounts. Changes you made to it since then are undone too.
• Tell us what was wrong. Under What's wrong?, choose It's the wrong person, Some details are wrong or Some details are missing. For the last two, pick which details. Tap Send. You can fix or add the details yourself in the contact.

Get a new private address

1. Open Settings, then Add by email.
2. Tap Get a new private address, then Get a new address.

Your old private address stops working at once. The shared address keeps working. If it fails, the screen says "We couldn't get a new address. Your current one still works. Try again."

If something goes wrong

Each reason appears on the row in Forwarded emails.

• "We couldn't check who sent it, so we didn't read it or reply." Forward it to your private address from one of your two-way accounts.
• "It came from an address that isn't one of your accounts." Forward it from the account you want the contact in.
• "It came from a read-only account, which takes no new contacts." Forward it from a two-way account.
• "It was too large to read." Forward just the message with the signature.
• "We couldn't find a name, email address or phone number in it." Forward an email whose signature has them.
• "The only signature in it was your own." Forward an email from the person you want to add.
• "The signature named more than one person." Forward an email with one person's signature.
• "N more emails we couldn't check." We didn't read them or reply. Someone may be sending emails in your name.
• "We can't find this email." It may belong to another ContactZapp account. Sign in with the account you forwarded it from.