Contacts

In a shared inbox, whoever's free answers — not necessarily the person who actually knows that customer. A long-standing account manager's emails can land with someone who's never spoken to them before, and the history that made the relationship work goes with it.

Contacts fixes that without needing a CRM: upload a list mapping each sender to the teammate who owns them, once, and ReplyFabric routes their emails to that person automatically — as part of a category's own routing, or mailbox-wide via Dispatch-Only Mode, which skips categorization entirely and forwards straight to the owner. There's also a separate Customers list for assigning ownership at the account/domain level instead of per individual sender — this article covers Contacts specifically.

Find it under Contacts in the sidebar.

This isn't opt-in. Every category's Responsible assignment source already checks your contact list by default, before falling back to its own responsible person — activating a list changes routing for every category at once, not just the one you had in mind. If a sender also matches a Customers account, that match wins instead. See Category Management if you want a specific category to ignore either list.

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Preparing your list

A contact list is a CSV with four columns: first_name, last_name, email, and owner_email.

owner_email must be one of your own teammates — an existing ReplyFabric user in your organization, not the contact's own address. It's who that row's emails get routed to, not who they're from.

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Uploading it

Click Upload Contacts, give the list a name, and upload the CSV.

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Validating owners

Every owner_email needs to be a real, active ReplyFabric user before the list can go live. If one isn't yet, ReplyFabric flags it and offers to send them an invitation directly from the validation screen — and once every owner is valid, the list is ready to activate:

Here's exactly what that teammate receives — worth knowing before you send it, so you know what to tell them to expect:

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Activating it

From the Contacts overview, click Activate on a validated list.

Once active, a Dispatch Mode Ready prompt appears, pointing you at Dispatch-Only Mode if you want ReplyFabric to forward by ownership instead of by category.

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Seeing it work

Here's the effect in practice. Ruben emails in about an appointment, and his contact record's owner is Alex Lyor:

Because Ruben's email matched that contact, Alex becomes this email's responsible person — which shows up two ways: the thread carries AL, Alex's initials, as its Internal Responsible Initials label (see Mailbox Settings: Provider-Side Interaction), and the AI-drafted reply signs off as Alex Lyor — [YourName] falling back to the responsible person here, following the same sender → responsible person → mailbox name order described in Category Management.

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What's next

• Category Management: Settings, Templates & Persona — assign "Contact list, then category default" as a category's Responsible assignment source.
• Mailbox Settings: Details & Dispatch-Only Mode — forward by contact ownership mailbox-wide, bypassing categorization entirely.