Categories & Relationships

Every contact carries three pieces of information that shape how MailPrism treats their email: a category (how you've grouped them), a status (whether you trust or block them), and a relationship type (how well you actually know them). This page explains all three and how they feed rules and cold-outreach detection.

Contact categories

A category is a label you put on a contact to organize your list — for example, Client or Vendor. Categories come in two kinds.

System categories

MailPrism ships with a set of predefined categories everyone can use:

Family Friend Colleague Client Vendor Partner Acquaintance VIP

Custom categories

You can also create your own categories with two scopes:

Scope	Who can see it
Personal	Private to you
Workspace	Shared with everyone in your workspace

Assign a category when you add or edit a contact, or filter the contacts list by category. On Business-tier workspaces with AI enabled, the Detect button can suggest a category automatically.

Don't confuse category with status

A category is for your organization (Client, Vendor, VIP). Status is what changes how MailPrism handles the email (trust or block). They're independent — a VIP client can also be on your allowlist.

Contact status

A contact's status is the lever that changes how MailPrism handles their email. There are three values:

Status	Label in app	What it does
allowlist	Trusted	Trusted sender. Never flagged as a cold email.
denylist	Blocked	Blocked sender. Treated as unwanted.
normal	Normal	Standard contact, no special treatment.

New contacts are Normal by default. Set the status when you add or edit a contact, or filter the list by status.

Status on a whole domain

Because a contact can be a domain as well as a single address, you can trust or block everyone at a company in one entry. When MailPrism checks an incoming sender against domain-level contacts, denylist wins over allowlist if both somehow apply — blocking is the safer default.

Using status in rules

In rule conditions, status appears as Trust Status:

Trusted contact (allowlist) Blocked sender (denylist) Not specified (normal)

You can also match Is Known Contact (true / false) to act on anyone in — or not in — your contacts.

Relationship type

While status is something you set, relationship type is something MailPrism computes from your interaction history with a contact. It answers "how well do I actually know this person?"

Relationship	Label in app	Meaning
unknown	Unknown	No interaction history yet
cold	Cold	You've received from them but never emailed them
warm	Warm	Some back-and-forth history
established	Established	A regular contact with a real history

How it's calculated

MailPrism recomputes the relationship every time it records an interaction, using your sent and received counts:

• Unknown — no interactions recorded at all.
• Cold — you've never sent them an email, even if they've emailed you. This is the signal cold-outreach detection leans on.
• Established — you've sent at least one email and there are 6 or more total interactions spanning more than 30 days of history.
• Warm — everything in between: you've emailed them and have at least one interaction, but haven't yet crossed the established threshold.

Why "never sent = cold" matters

A stranger who lands one email in your inbox is, by definition, someone you've never written to — so they read as cold. That's exactly the pattern unsolicited sales and outreach follow, which is why relationship type is so useful for filtering.

How this feeds cold-outreach detection and rules

These three properties work together:

1. Cold-outreach detection. A cold relationship — a sender you've never emailed — is a strong hint the message is unsolicited. Combined with AI's cold-outreach signal, it helps MailPrism separate genuine first-contact from sales spam. An allowlist status overrides this: trusted senders are never flagged as cold.

2. The auto-contact filter. When an inbound email is excluded (cold outreach, spam, automated, and so on), MailPrism only removes the auto-created contact if it's still cold with no outbound email — so your real relationships stay safe. See the auto-contact filter.

3. Rules. In conditions you can match on Sender History (the relationship), Trust Status, and Is Known Contact to build automations like "if a cold sender pitches me, archive it" or "never touch email from a trusted contact."

→ Back to: Contacts overview · More on classification signals