Companies

What a company is

A company groups the contacts that belong to the same customer. When five people at Acme write in, a company ties them together, so you can open Acme and see everyone there and every ticket they have ever sent.

Without it, a contact is a flat row: one address, one workspace, nothing connecting it to a colleague. An agent reading a ticket from jane@acme.com cannot tell that three other people at Acme have open tickets too.

Companies are optional. Nothing in There There requires one, and a workspace that never creates a company works exactly as it did before.

Creating a company from a contact

Companies are created by hand, one at a time, from a contact. There is no button on the companies list, and There There never invents a company on its own. That is deliberate: creating one company per inbound domain would fill the list with recruiters, vendors, and no-reply addresses within a week.

Open a contact, go to the Properties tab, and open the Company field. At the bottom of the list, choose "Create new company...". A dialog opens with:

• Name, prefilled with a guess from the email domain. An address at acme.com suggests "Acme".
• Domain, prefilled with the domain of the contact's address.
• Phone and Notes, both empty.
• A checkbox list of the other contacts at that same domain who are not in a company yet.

Every contact in the list starts checked, and there is a Select all toggle above it. Seeing the list is the point: you can uncheck noreply@acme.com before you save. The contact you started from always joins the new company, whatever the checkboxes say.

Both the name and the domain are only suggestions. Correct them before saving if the guess is off, which it will be for a domain like acme.co.uk, where the guess is the last two labels of the address.

If the contact already has a colleague in a company that owns their domain, the Company field offers it under a Suggested heading instead, so you attach them rather than creating a duplicate.

How contacts join a company

A company can own one domain. When a contact is created and the host of their email address matches that domain exactly, the contact joins the company.

That rule runs once, at the moment the contact is created, and it never runs again. There is no periodic re-sync. Two consequences follow, and both surprise people:

• Changing a company's domain later does not move any existing contact. It only decides which contacts created from then on will join. The domain field on the company page says as much: "New contacts at this domain will join this company automatically. Existing contacts are not moved."
• Moving a contact by hand is permanent. Nothing runs a second time that could undo your choice.

Matching is on the full host of the address, not a shortened version of it. A company that owns acme.com collects jane@acme.com but not bob@mail.acme.com. If you need both, create a second company for the subdomain, or move those contacts across by hand.

A domain belongs to at most one company per workspace. Two companies claiming acme.com has no sensible answer, so the second one is rejected with a message saying the domain is already taken. Two different workspaces can each have their own company for the same domain.

Personal email providers

Addresses at gmail.com, outlook.com, icloud.com, proton.me, telenet.be, and a few dozen other consumer providers never get a suggested domain. Grouping everyone with a Gmail address into one company would be worse than not grouping them at all.

For those contacts the dialog opens with an empty Domain field and the line "This looks like a personal email provider, so it cannot be used to match contacts automatically. Leave it empty or enter the company's own domain."

The suppression only affects the suggestion. You can still create a company for a freelancer who works from a Gmail address, and you can still type a domain yourself. The company simply will not collect new contacts automatically until it has a domain worth matching on.

The companies list

Companies sits next to Contacts in the sidebar. The table shows the name with the domain underneath, the number of contacts, and the number of tickets. All three columns sort, and the search box matches on name and domain.

Until you create your first one, the page explains that companies are optional and are made from a contact.

Like everything else, the list is scoped to your channels. A member with access to only some channels sees only the companies that have a ticket in one of those channels, and both counts beside each company are narrowed the same way, so a number never describes a channel you cannot open.

The company page

Click a company to open it. The header shows the name, the domain, and how many tickets and contacts it has. Below that are three tabs.

Properties

Name, domain, phone, and notes, with a Save button. Notes are internal, and they apply to the whole company rather than to one person, so this is where the context that is true for everyone at that customer belongs.

Tickets

Every ticket from every contact in the company, with the subject, who sent it, the status, and when it was created. It has its own search box, and clicking a row opens the ticket in the inbox. This is the view that makes a company worth creating: one place to see everything a customer has ever asked.

Contacts

Everyone in the company, with their ticket count. Clicking a row opens that contact.

Moving a contact between companies

Open the contact, go to the Properties tab, and use the Company field. It searches your companies as you type. Pick another company to move the contact, or pick "No company" to detach them. Nothing is saved until you press Save.

A move you make here is final. Because the domain rule only ever runs at contact creation, no automatic process will move the contact back.

Deleting a company

Delete a company from the "..." menu on its row in the companies list. The confirmation says it plainly: the contacts stay, along with every ticket, and only the grouping is removed.

That is the whole effect. Contacts own tickets, and a company is only a label over a set of contacts, so removing the label never touches a conversation. The contacts you deleted the company from simply have no company again, and you can group them differently whenever you like.

Deleting a contact is a very different thing, and it does destroy their tickets.