Behind every conversation in your inbox is a contact: the person who wrote in. The Contacts page gives you one place to look up anyone who has reached out, review their history and block the ones who should not be able to write again. This guide also explains how Helpdesky keeps newsletters and automated mail out of your way, and what happens to old conversations over time. For the day to day flow of answering messages, see Working the Shared Inbox.
The Contacts page
Open Contacts in the dashboard sidebar. The page lists everyone who has messaged this help center through the widget, contact form, ticket center or forwarded email. A contact is created the first time an email address writes in, and every later conversation from that address is attached to the same contact.
The table shows five columns:
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Name | The name the visitor gave, or No name if they did not |
| The address their conversations are tied to | |
| Last contacted | When they last wrote in, shown as a relative time |
| Conversations | How many conversations they have started, including archived ones |
| Status | A Blocked badge when the contact is blocked |
Use the search box to find someone by name or email, and the All, Active and Blocked chips to filter. Each chip shows a count so you can see at a glance how many contacts you have blocked. The list shows 50 contacts per page with Previous and Next buttons underneath.
If you run several help centers, the page follows the help center selected in the sidebar switcher. Contacts are kept separately per help center. See Running Several Help Centers on One Account.
Contacts requires messaging to be enabled for the help center and the Messages permission for your account. If the page says messaging is not enabled, turn it on from Settings.
Contact details and history
Click any row to open the contact drawer. It shows the contact's avatar, name, email and whether they are Active or Blocked, followed by a Conversations list with the subject, status and a preview of each thread. Click a conversation to open it in the inbox with Open in Messages.
To correct a mistyped address, click Edit email, change it and click Save. Every conversation from that contact follows the new address, and future replies are emailed there. If another contact already uses the address you entered, the save is refused. In that case open one of their conversations in Messages, edit the email from the contact panel there and accept the prompt to reassign the conversation to the existing contact.
Names are set by the visitor when they write in and are not editable from the dashboard.
Block a contact
Blocking stops a person from sending anything new while keeping what they already sent.
- Open the contact from the Contacts page, or click Contact info in a conversation and scroll to the bottom of the panel.
- Click Block contact.
- Confirm in the dialog.
From that moment the contact cannot send new messages or start conversations through the widget, contact form, ticket center or email. In the widget, contact form and ticket center they see a generic message asking them to try again later, so they are not told they were blocked. Emails from a blocked address are accepted by the mail server and then discarded, so nothing bounces back to them.
Their existing conversations stay in your inbox with a Blocked badge, and you can still read them and reply. Blocking is per help center: a contact blocked in one help center can still write to another.
Unblock a contact
Use the Blocked filter on the Contacts page to find them, open the drawer and click Unblock contact. The same button appears in the conversation contact panel. They can write again immediately.
Promotional email filtering
If you forward a shared mailbox into Helpdesky, newsletters, receipts and marketing blasts arrive alongside real customer questions. Helpdesky checks the headers of every inbound email and files the obvious bulk mail separately so it does not interrupt your team.
How an email is detected as promotional
An email is flagged when it carries any of these signals:
- A List-Unsubscribe header, which mailing list and newsletter tools add to every send
- A Precedence header set to bulk, list or junk
- An Auto-Submitted header, used by automatic responders and system notifications
- A Feedback-ID or X-Campaign header, used by campaign tools to track sends
- An X-Mailer header naming a bulk mail service such as Mailchimp, SendGrid, Klaviyo, HubSpot, Marketo, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, Brevo or Mailgun
- An automated sender address such as noreply, newsletter, marketing, notifications, updates, news, info or hello, combined with a technical fingerprint from one of those services
Detection uses headers only. Helpdesky does not read the message body to decide, and messages from the widget, contact form and ticket center are never flagged.
Where promotional messages go
Flagged emails become conversations with the Promotional status. They are excluded from the All, Pending, Open and Stale filters in the inbox and only appear under the Promotional filter. When new ones arrive, a banner at the top of the inbox reads N new promotional messages with View and Dismiss buttons.
If a promotional email replies into a conversation that already exists, the message is added to the thread quietly: it does not mark the conversation unread and does not wake up a stale conversation.
Notifications for promotional mail
By default your team still receives the usual email notification for a flagged message, with a note that it was filed as promotional. To silence these, go to Settings > Notifications and turn off Notify me about promotional messages. The conversation is still created, you just are not emailed about it. The timing of ordinary notifications is described in Email Notification Timing.
When the filter gets it wrong
Some legitimate senders use bulk mail tools, for example a customer whose company routes support requests through a marketing platform. Open the conversation and you will see a banner reading This conversation was flagged as promotional. Click Not promotional to move it to Pending, where it behaves like any other conversation. Helpdesky does not learn from this yet, so a future email from the same sender with the same headers is flagged again.
Promotional conversations are not marked stale and are not auto resolved. Resolve or delete them when you have looked, or leave them under the Promotional filter where they do not affect your working counts.
Retention and automatic cleanup
Conversations move through a few automatic stages, all of which you can tune under Settings > Messages:
- Stale marking is on by default. Pending and open conversations with no activity for 14 days (adjustable) get a Stale badge and move under the Stale filter. Any new message clears it.
- Auto resolve is off by default. When you enable it, Helpdesky waits the configured number of days (30 by default) from the moment you switched it on, so nothing is closed instantly, then resolves inactive conversations once an hour from then on.
- Archiving happens every night: resolved conversations older than 30 days move to an archive. They remain visible under All and Resolved, still appear in search and in each contact's history, and can be reopened if the customer writes again. Archiving is about keeping the live inbox fast, not about removing data.
Nothing is deleted automatically. The only way a conversation disappears is if a team member uses Delete conversation in the inbox, which removes it and its messages permanently. Contacts are never deleted automatically either, so a blocked contact stays blocked until someone unblocks them.
On the Free and Pro plans, conversations beyond the monthly limit show as Locked in the inbox until the month resets or you upgrade. Locked conversations are kept, not removed. See Plans, Limits and Billing.
Open Contacts now and scan the Blocked filter. If it is empty, that is a good sign, and you know where the button is when you need it.