User contacts and original contacts

If a contact that you create has an e-mail address which also belongs to a user, the contact is automatically associated to this user and the contact is called a user contact. The same goes for e-mail addresses which have received an invitation for registration (so called ‘pending e-mail addresses’). In such a case, the user name or the pending e-mail address is added to the name of the contact in parentheses. The type of the contact, which is shown in the ‘Status’ column, changes from ‘Contact’ to ‘User’ or ‘Pending E-Mail Address’.

The type of a contact is also indicated by its icon:

contact  normal contact

user contact  contact associated to a user

pending e-mail contact  contact associated to a pending e-mail address

Note: If a contact has several e-mail addresses, it will be associated to a user only if this is the only user that has corresponding e-mail addresses.

Contacts created by the [Choose users] action are not only associated to a user or pending e-mail address, but also show the original attributes which the respective users have entered in the ‘Personal Data’ section of their personal profiles. Such contacts are called original con­tacts, have the type ‘User’ or ‘Pending E-Mail Address’.

Original user contacts can be distinguished by their icons from other contacts of the same type.

user  original user contact

pending e-mail address  original contact of a pending e-mail address

Original user contacts are specific in that they always show the same attributes that the re­spec­tive users have set in their personal profiles, i.e. the attributes of an original contact are automatically updated.

The original contact of a pending e-mail address is automatically converted to an original user contact as soon as the corresponding user registers.

Original contacts usually have a member group of restricted members to be detected by the group icon member group in the ‘Share’ column. This is the group of those users who also have this con­tact in their address book or some contact list.

For completeness sake, we would like to mention that user contacts may also show other icons depending on the state of their corresponding user accounts: e.g. ‘Bounced E-Mail Address’ (user whose e-mail address has become invalid) , ‘Locked User’ (user whose user ac­count has been locked by the administrator) or ‘Expired User’ (user whose temporally limited account has expired).