Working out who a message is from

Best-effort matching of an inbound sender to a contact, run after storage and never able to block or discard a message.

What it is

After the message is safely stored, the sender is matched to a contact — by normalised phone for texts and calls, by address for email. The result is recorded as matched, unmatched or ambiguous, and more than one candidate deliberately produces 'ambiguous' rather than a guess.

Also called: message not linked to the customer · match text to contact · who sent this

See it
Working out who a message is from
🔒ridgelinepostframe.com/project/inboun510
Barndominium
Framing · on schedule
Not a screen — a decision diagram: sender → normalise → 0 / 1 / many hits → unmatched / matched / ambiguous. Sample data — no customer information appears here.
How it works
  1. 1Never throws and never blocks the write
  2. 2Phones are normalised on both sides and compared in code, because they are stored in whatever shape they arrived in
  3. 3Exactly one hit is matched; more than one is ambiguous; none is unmatched
  4. 4Matching runs against the canonical contact store
Why we built it

Matching an incoming message to the person who sent it is the kind of thing that can be completely broken and still look right — an early version searched a store that had been left empty, so it would have returned "unknown sender" for every message ever received while appearing to work perfectly. Every inbound message is now matched to a contact on a best-effort basis, after it has already been stored. The matching can never block or discard a message, so failing to identify a sender costs a label, not the message.

The problem
  • Messages not associated with the customer who sent them
  • Matching against the wrong data store
  • Wrong-contact attribution when two records share details
Sound familiar?
What you get
Replies join the right conversation automatically
Ambiguity is surfaced rather than resolved by guessing
A matching failure never costs a message

See it on your own jobs

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