A contact is a saved record in your workspace that represents a person you have sent files to, requested files from, or someone you have manually added. One record per email address per workspace. Contacts let you identify, track, and manage the people you share files with over time, and on Pro, give a contact their own sign-in to your workspace (the client portal).
What a contact record contains
Each contact stores the following:
First name
Last name (optional)
Email address (required)
Contact type: personal or business
Avatar (auto-resolved from Gravatar for personal contacts)
Organization membership, if the contact belongs to one
Portal access status (Pro), upload folder and storage limit if portal access is on
When a contact is marked as a business contact, Tarkle attempts to automatically resolve a logo from the contact's email domain, giving business contacts a visual identity without any manual work.
How Contacts are created
There are two ways a contact ends up in your workspace.
Manually. Go to the Contacts tab and click the + Contact button. Fill in the first name and email address, and optionally a last name. You can also mark the contact as a business contact and enter an organization name. The contact is saved immediately and the person receives no notification.
Automatically from a transfer. When you create a transfer and address it to one or more email addresses, the system automatically creates a contact for each email that does not already exist in your workspace. The contact is created at the moment the transfer is sent, using the email as the primary identifier and the email prefix as a default first name. No extra steps are needed — the contact appears in your Contacts list after the transfer is sent.
If a contact already exists in your workspace when you send a transfer to their email, no duplicate is created. The existing contact is linked to the new transfer instead.
Portal access (Pro)
On Pro, you can give a contact their own sign-in to your workspace. Open their contact page and turn on Portal access — they get an emailed sign-in link and can sign in to see what you've shared (Home, Files, Shared, Requests) and upload back into their own folder, capped at a storage limit you set (5 GB by default). The Contacts list shows an Enabled or Disabled badge per contact. On Free, contacts are plain records and portal access can't be turned on.
What you can do with contacts
From the Contacts tab you can:
Search contacts by name, email, or organization
Set a per-contact storage limit for portal uploads (shown when portal access is on)
Export selected contacts as a CSV file
Delete contacts (contacts in an organization must be removed from it first)
View transfer history associated with a contact
Deleting a contact also deletes any transfers associated with that contact.
Contacts and organizations
A contact can belong to an organization, but this isn't automatic. Marking a contact as a Business contact (and giving an organization name), or adding them to an existing organization, is what creates the link. A plain transfer to a new email only creates a contact — no organization. A contact that belongs to an organization cannot be deleted directly — you must remove them from the organization first. To understand how organizations work, see What Is an Organization in Tarkle and Contacts and Organizations: How They Work Together.