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 VIPCustom 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.
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 | Very little history — one interaction |
warm | Warm | Some history — 2 to 5 interactions |
established | Established | A regular contact — 6 or more interactions |
How it's calculated
MailPrism recomputes the relationship every time it records an interaction, using the total number of interactions (emails sent plus received) with that contact:
| Total interactions | Relationship |
|---|---|
| 6 or more | Established |
| 2–5 | Warm |
| 1 | Cold |
Unknown means no interactions have been recorded yet.
Both directions count the same: one email you sent and one you received is two
interactions. In rule conditions these
values appear under Sender History as First-time sender (cold), Have
exchanged before (warm), and Regular contact (established). Despite its label,
First-time sender means a single interaction in either direction — someone you
emailed once who never replied is cold too.
A stranger who lands one email in your inbox has almost no history with you — 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:
-
Cold-outreach detection. A
coldrelationship — a sender with almost no history with you — 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. Anallowliststatus overrides this: trusted senders are never flagged as cold. -
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
coldwith no outbound email — so your real relationships stay safe. See the auto-contact filter. -
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