Contacts

The three states

Every synchronized contact carries one of three states. Use the segmented control on each row, or the bulk buttons in the selection footer, to change it.

• Rules Apply (default). Rules still run, but Premail treats the sender as known. Cold-email, spam, marketing, recruiter, fundraising, conference invite, affiliate-marketing, and AI-generated-outreach rules will not match. Newsletter, commerce, shipping, security-alert, travel, and finance rules continue to run normally, as do all of your custom rules.
• Allowed. Bypasses all rules. The message is delivered to your inbox unmodified. Use this for senders whose mail should never be filtered.
• Blocked. Auto-trashed before classification. Use this for contacts you've kept in your address book but don't want to hear from.

Two subtabs: Synchronized and Manual

The Contacts tab has two subtabs.

• Synchronized. Contacts imported from your Gmail, Outlook, or iCloud account. Filter by state (All / Rules Apply / Allowed / Blocked) and sort by name, email, or state. The filter and sort settings are remembered across visits.
• Manual. The allow/block lists you maintain by hand. This is the same UI that used to live under Rules › Senders. It just moved here so all of your sender preferences live in one place.

Enabling sync per account

Each connected account in the Accounts tab has a "Sync contacts from this account" toggle. New connects default to on. Toggling it off stops syncing for that account; contacts that came from it disappear from the Synchronized list on the next refresh.

For Gmail accounts already connected before this feature shipped, the toggle is on but the OAuth token is missing the Contacts scope. The card will show "Needs permission" with a Grant access button. Clicking it walks Google's incremental consent screen for the single new scope. For Outlook, the consent dialog is all-or-nothing, so Grant access re-prompts the full scope bundle. iCloud uses your existing app-specific password against CardDAV with no extra consent step.

Bulk state changes

Select rows with the left-edge checkboxes (or "Select all visible") and use the footer buttons to move the selection to Rules Apply, Allowed, or Blocked in bulk. The footer shows how many rows are selected, and if your search has hidden any of them, it tells you how many are off-screen so you know exactly what the bulk action will touch.

Manual takes precedence over Synchronized

If a sender appears in both stores with conflicting states, the Manual entry wins. For example, if you've explicitly typed noreply@spam.com into the Manual blocked list and that same address is also a synchronized contact you allowed, Premail blocks the message. The Synchronized row shows a small "Blocked by Manual" pill so you can see why your row state has no visible effect.

What's stored, and where

Synced contacts are saved locally in your app data directory and never sent to any Premail server. Premail has no servers processing your private data, so your address book cannot leave your machine through Premail. Provider calls go directly from your computer to Google, Microsoft, or Apple. Premail stores name and email only, and photos are skipped to keep the file small.