Contact Creation
timelit keeps your Outlook address book up to date automatically. Every new person you email becomes a proper contact, enriched with details from their email signature.
Why we built this
Most people's Outlook contacts are a graveyard: the people you actually talk to every day are missing, because nobody creates contacts manually. That has annoying consequences: no autocomplete with full details when composing, and since your phone syncs contacts from Outlook, calls from real business partners show up as random numbers.
With Contact Creation, anyone you've ever written to is in your contacts with name, company, phone, and website. And when they call your phone, you see who it is.
How it works
1. You send an email. Whenever you send or reply to an email, timelit looks at all recipients (To, Cc, Bcc).
2. New people become contacts. For every recipient you've never written to before, timelit creates an Outlook contact with their name and email address. The contact is tagged with the "timelit" category, so you can always tell automatically created contacts apart from your own, and filter or bulk-delete them anytime.
3. The signature fills in the rest. When that person later replies to you, timelit reads their email signature and extracts company, phone number, and website, then completes the contact in Outlook. This happens once per contact; timelit doesn't keep rewriting contacts on every email.
4. Your phone stays in sync. Since Outlook contacts sync to your smartphone, the next time that person calls, you see their name and company instead of an unknown number.
What timelit will never do
- Touch your existing contacts. If a person already exists in your Outlook contacts (created manually or from a previous sync), timelit leaves them completely alone: no duplicates, no overwrites. Signature enrichment only applies to contacts timelit created itself.
- Create contacts from bare addresses. If an email address comes without a real name (e.g.
noreply@...), no contact is created. - Add yourself. Your own addresses and aliases are always skipped.
Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Contact Creation (main toggle) | Turns automatic contact creation from sent emails on or off. |
| Signature enrichment | Whether timelit extracts company, phone, and website from incoming signatures to complete your contacts. |
Good to know
- Want to review what timelit created? In Outlook, filter your contacts by the "timelit" category.
- Deleting a timelit-created contact in Outlook is fine. timelit won't recreate it from old emails, only if you write to that person again.
- This feature requires the E-Mail connection with contact permissions, see Connecting Microsoft 365.