Identify a Message Sender

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Overview

When someone emails an Apostra inbox, Apostra keeps the message as a Session — a durable conversation and its working context — before anyone knows who wrote it. The sender is retained as an observation: the address Apostra saw on the envelope. An observation carries no account membership, no verified identity, and no permission to act. Account admins can say who that observed sender is. A decision names a customer, an advertiser, or a user, and Apostra keeps it as a dated, attributed record of how the conclusion was reached.

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What you can see

Your admins see senders observed on Sessions that belong to your own account. A message that reached a shared Apostra inbox rather than your account’s inbox belongs to that receiving integration and is not visible to any customer; only Apostra operators can identify those senders. Each entry shows the transport the message arrived on, the observed address, the display name when the message carried one, when the sender was first and last observed, how many messages Apostra has seen from them, and every link decision that currently stands. Filter by unresolved to see only senders with no standing confirmed link — the queue of people still to identify.

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Recording a decision

A decision has a state and a target. States

• candidate — a proposed identification that nobody has confirmed. Several candidates can stand at once.
• confirmed — the standing answer.
• rejected — this target is not who the sender is.
• revoked — a previously confirmed link that no longer holds.

Targets

• customer — the account the sender belongs to.
• advertiser — one of that customer’s advertisers.
• principal — a user who is a member of that customer.

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Rules that apply

• You must be an account admin. Other members cannot see the list or record a decision.
• Identify the customer first. On a shared-inbox Session, an advertiser or user cannot be linked until a customer is confirmed for that sender. On your own account’s Session the customer is already your account, and naming a different one is refused.
• One customer at a time. A sender can carry several candidate customers, but only one confirmed one. Revoke or reject the standing confirmation before confirming a different customer.
• The target must be real and related. The advertiser must belong to that customer and not be archived; the user must hold an active membership of it.
• Decisions are never edited. Changing your mind records a new decision that supersedes the previous one. The earlier decision stays readable and is reported as superseded.
• Evidence is chosen by Apostra, not by you. Each decision is bound to a retained message in that conversation, so a later conclusion can never appear to have been known to an earlier message.
• Record decisions as yourself. A decision made while impersonating another user is refused, because the record names the person who made it for as long as it is kept.

Send a clientRequestId you generate with each decision. Repeating it returns the original decision unchanged, so a retried request never records a second conclusion.

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Availability

This is an early capability, enabled per account. Email intake is not yet generally available, so most accounts will have no observed senders to identify. Contact your Apostra representative if you want your account enrolled.

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