normal contact If an email address is entered for a contact that also has a user, the contact is assigned to this user. It is then a user contact. The same applies to so-called provisional email addresses, i.e. addresses to which an invitation to self-registration has gone out. A contact with such an email address will be assigned to the respective provisional email address. In these cases, the username or provisional email address is added to the contact's name in parentheses and the type of the contact displayed in the 'Status' column of the contact list overview changes from 'Contact' to 'User' or 'Provisional email address'.
You can also recognize the contact's type by its icon:
normal contact
contact assigned to a
user
Contact assigned to a temporary
email address
Note: If several email addresses are entered for a contact-, it will only be assigned to one user if this is clearly possible, i.e. if there is only one user who has email addresses matching the contact.
Contacts that you have created using the [Select user] action are not only always assigned to a user or a temporary email address, but also have the original attributes that the respective user has set in the 'Personal data' tab of his personal profile. Such contacts are called original contacts and have the type 'User' or 'Provisional email address'.
Original contacts can be distinguished from other contacts of the same type by their symbol:
original user contact
original contact of a
temporary email address
The special feature of original user contacts is that they always have exactly the attributes that the respective user has set in his personal profile, i.e. the attributes of an original user contact are automatically updated.
The original contact of a temporary email address is automatically converted into an original user contact as soon as the user in question registers.
Original contacts usually have a member group of restricted
members, indicated by the group icon
in the share column.
This is the group of those users who have this original contact in their address
book or a contact list.
-For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that user contacts may also have other types depending on the state of your user account: for example, 'Invalid email address' (user whose email address has become invalid), 'Locked user' (user whose user account has been locked by the administrator) or 'Expired user' (temporary user whose user account has expired).