When Using Our Extension to Track Emails, This Can Create Placeholder Profiles to Apollo

Creating Contact Profiles (Not Placeholder Profiles) in Apollo 

Apollo has four primary methods for creating contacts, but none of them are responsible for creating placeholder profiles. To review, the four methods are:

• Manual contact creation
• CSV import
• CRM import/sync
• Adding contacts through the extension

Each of these will create a contact profile like the one shown below -

If you send a message outside of Apollo to an email that belongs to a contact, that message will always be associated with the contact's profile in Apollo. This will happen regardless of whether the extension is installed.

Creating Placeholder Profiles in Apollo

Placeholder profiles are created when you send a message outside of Apollo to an email that doesn't belong to a contact, and also have the Track checkbox enabled, as shown below -

The person shown above has not been added as a contact in Apollo, so sending a message with tracking enabled creates the following placeholder profile - 

These profiles don't represent actual contacts though, so they are not searchable as contacts anywhere in Apollo. For example, when I use the Contacts page to search for the email that was messaged in the Gmail composer, nothing is returned -

If I search for this email in the Outbox page, however, that returns the email itself. Clicking on the name next to this email (highlighted below) is then what brings me to the placeholder profile -

Note: Aside from the Outbox page, placeholder profiles will also appear in your Triggers page.

What Are These Placeholder Profiles For?

When no contacts correspond to the email you're messaging, we don't want to automatically assume that this person should be created in Apollo as a full contact, as this would potentially clutter up your contacts list. However, any time you track a message in Apollo, there must be something for us to associate the message with. Placeholder profiles are intended to get around this.