Core concepts

CommSync builds around one idea: a conversation belongs to a contact, not a channel. Before you can drive the app fluently, it helps to understand how the pieces fit together. This page covers the core vocabulary and the rules that govern what your team shares versus what stays private to you.

Your private contact graph

The building blocks

Org-canonical vs your private view

The most important distinction in CommSync is which information is shared across your team and which information is private to each member.

Org-canonical — one copy, shared by all team members with access:

• Channels (phone numbers, email accounts)
• Threads
• Messages
• Attachments

Private to you — each member has their own independent view:

• Contacts and their Identities
• Labels
• View state: read or unread, archived, snoozed, starred

This means five teammates who share one inbox see the same inbound message. Each teammate can independently mark it read, archive it, or assign their own labels, and none of those actions touches what the others see. Your contact graph is yours alone.

Identities and contacts

An Identity is a single channel address — a phone number or an email address — normalized to a canonical form. Within your contact graph, each identity is unique: you can only have one Identity for +15551234567.

A contact (stored as a Person row) owns one or more Identities. When you receive an SMS and an email from the same customer, CommSync can link those two Identities under one contact. Their threads then collapse into a single timeline.

Orphan identities

When a message arrives from an address you have never seen before, CommSync creates an Identity automatically. CommSync does not yet attach that Identity to any contact — CommSync calls it an orphan. The thread still appears in your inbox; it carries the phone number or email address as its label until you organize it.

You can resolve orphans in a few ways:

• Attach the orphan to a contact you already have.
• Promote it to a brand-new contact.

Both are actions you take deliberately — CommSync never attaches an orphan to a contact on its own. Once you attach an orphan to a contact, its thread moves under that contact, and the unified conversation history becomes visible. See Merging identities for the full walkthrough.

Channels and channel access

Phone numbers and email accounts belong to your org. Within the org, your role and membership set who can see and send through each channel:

• Owner and Admin — implicit access to every channel in the org.
• Member — explicit access only to the specific channels they have been granted.

If you are a Member without access to a channel, the threads on that channel are invisible to you. An Owner or Admin can grant or revoke access at any time, and you keep your view state either way.

See Roles & permissions for the full RBAC model.

Threads and messages

A Thread groups messages from the same conversation. For email, CommSync uses the standard RFC 5322 In-Reply-To / References chain to stitch replies together — the same algorithm every mail client uses. For SMS, each unique remote phone number gets its own thread.

Because Threads are org-canonical, a permanent delete affects everyone with access. Archiving, on the other hand, affects only your view: when you archive a thread, your teammates keep their own view of it.

Labels

Labels are yours. You create them, choose their colors, and assign them to a Contact or an Identity. A label you name "VIP" stays entirely separate from a teammate's label of the same name — they never collide or merge.

Labels appear on thread rows in the inbox, and you can use them as filters. You can also delegate label assignment to the AI. Give a label an AI prompt, and CommSync applies it automatically to threads whose recent messages match your criteria.

See Labels for the full guide.

Where to go next