5 min lesson
Ignore rules
Use Frontline ignore rules for a domain, a specific email, or internal domains, plus WhatsApp numbers and groups, at account or user level.
An ignore rule tells Frontline who must never become a person, and whose threads should stay off the CRM. It is the counterpart to All contacts and to WhatsApp review. Review is a queue. Ignore is a standing no.
You will use both. Pending review is for “I have not decided.” Ignore is for “this is never a client.”
What you can ignore
On email, a rule is one of three things: a specific address, a domain, or an internal domain.
A specific email is the narrowest. Ignore newsletter@custodian.com and that mailbox never becomes a person. Use this when the rest of the domain is fine, and only one address is noise.
A domain is broader. Ignore a vendor or a mailing platform and every address on that domain stays out, including subdomains. If you find yourself ignoring one address at a time from the same sender, stop and ignore the domain instead.
An internal domain is how you treat your own firm. Add yourfirm.com as internal and people on that domain show as Internal in Contact sync, not as Leads or Contacts. Teammate emails are classified the same way. That is not junk. It is a label that says “this is us.” Harrington Family Office is a Company. Your operations lead at your own domain is Internal. Do not make them a Lead, and do not ignore the whole firm as if it were spam. Use internal domains for the company. Use ignore for everyone else who should never be in the book.
For WhatsApp, a rule is a phone number or a group. Ignore the family group. Ignore a number that keeps writing and will never be a household. Personal WhatsApp without ignore rules, on all contacts, is how the CRM fills with people you cannot delete fast enough.
Rules can live at the account or on a user. Account rules protect the whole firm: a spam domain, a known vendor, the internal domains for the company, a group no one in Sales should import. User rules are personal: my school chat, my doctor, my own second number. Who may edit which list is the ignore override policy from Advanced settings. Admins and owners can always manage account rules, including internal domains.
How ignore shows up in Contact sync
Contact sync uses four statuses: Added, Internal, Pending review, and Ignored. Internal is the row you get from an internal domain or from Add internal. Ignored is the row you get from an address, a domain, a number, or a group you ruled out. The header counts tell you the size of each pile. Open Ignore rules from Contact sync when you want the lists, not the people.
If you ignore from a row, Frontline writes the rule and keeps that person out of People. If they were pending, they leave the review queue. If you later need them, remove the rule and restore. You cannot Add someone who is still covered by an ignore rule. The conflict is the point. Delete the rule first.
Internal rows are not waiting to be Added. They are already classified as the firm. If a client later writes from a lookalike domain, that is a different domain. Do not put client domains on the internal list.
Ignored and Internal people do not get a People timeline, and they do not feed Company Brain as clients. That is true in the app, for Max, and for the CLI. There is no side door.
When to ignore, when to mark Internal, when to review
Ignore noise and personal life: a specific email, or a whole domain when the domain is the problem. Mark Internal for the firm, by adding internal domains and by using Add internal on a teammate who slipped through. Review when a personal WhatsApp number might be a real client.
A newsletter address is a specific-email ignore. A vendor platform is a domain ignore. Your company domain is internal. A WhatsApp number that might be James’s spouse is Pending review, then Add, with the right company. Do not ignore a household because the first message looked informal. Do not Add a group of twenty parents because one of them is a client.
On a personal WhatsApp, start with manual review, turn off create-from-groups if groups are messy, and add ignore rules for the chats you already know are private. Set internal domains before you connect every mailbox, so the firm never hits Pending review. Then work the pending queue. That order saves more time than any later cleanup.
Keep the list boring
Name rules you can explain. This address. This domain. These internal domains. This number. This group. Do not build an ignore novel. If Sales and Support need different noise filters, use user lists for specific emails and numbers, and keep domains plus internal domains on the account list so the whole firm inherits them.
Revisit ignore when you connect a new mailbox or a new personal WhatsApp. New connections inherit account rules, including internal domains, not one person’s private list.
Next: Importing into objects, for the books that will never arrive from Gmail or WhatsApp.