Importing Contacts into Trevally: Import Once, Use Everywhere

Trevally's superpower is building your contact base straight from your inbox. But not every contact lives in your email: there's the LinkedIn connections export, the CSV from your old CRM, the iPhone address book. Import Contacts brings those in too. As we'll see, an import in Trevally isn't a one-time dump. It becomes a source you keep using all over the product.

Step 1: Pick your file (and tell Trevally where it came from)

Open Import Contacts (it's in the top bar and the sidebar) and the four-step wizard walks you through it. First, choose a CSV or vCard file and select the provider it was exported from:

• vCard: for iOS/Apple Contacts;
• Google CSV: Google Contacts exports;
• Outlook CSV: Microsoft exports;
• LinkedIn CSV: your connections export.

Picking the right provider is how Trevally knows each format's quirks in advance. You can also adjust the field delimiter (comma or semicolon, useful for spreadsheets saved in other locales).

And here's the first hidden gem, easy to miss at the bottom: "Select a Contact List (Not Required)". Choose one of your contact lists: "Family", "WhatsApp", "Conference Leads", and every imported contact lands in it automatically. Import and organize in one motion.

Step 2: Map the attributes (or don't, it's optional)

Next, Trevally shows how it plans to translate your file's columns into contact card fields. Columns like first_name, last_name and person_city are recognized and mapped automatically, each with its position in the file and the card field it will fill.

If the defaults look right, just hit Next. This whole step is optional. But if you want control, you have all of it. Select any column and edit its Properties: which category it belongs to, its label, placeholder, type, and what data it identifies. You can even rename and reorder entire categories:

Remember how contact cards adapt to you with custom categories and attributes? This is the same engine. Your import doesn't just fill cards, it can shape them.

The safety net: nothing gets lost

What about columns Trevally doesn't recognize? A LinkedIn export, for instance, carries fields like headline, person_industry or updated_from_linkedin. Instead of silently dropping them, the wizard gathers every unmapped column into an "Other Details" category. You can see all 37 of them in the example below, and remove only the ones you truly don't want:

Your data survives the trip by default; discarding is always your explicit choice.

Steps 3 & 4: Trevally does the rest

Confirm, and the import runs in the background. You can keep using the app while the cards are created with the attributes you mapped. When the processing finishes you get the friendly "Importing Concluded" notification, and the wizard's final step says it all:

The part nobody tells you: your import is now a source

Here's where Trevally quietly outgrows every address book you've used. That file you just imported isn't forgotten. It's remembered as a named source, with its provider and contact count (say, CSV-short.csv · LinkedIn · 28 contacts). And everywhere Trevally asks you to pick people, you'll find a Select Contacts dialog with your data sources on the side: your Contacts, your Lists, and your CSV/vCard imports, with Tags, Web Forms and API Integrations already visible on the way.

That means "the 28 people from my LinkedIn export" is a living cohort you can drop into a feature as a group, months after the import. A few places where this works today:

Kanban boards

Building a hiring pipeline or deal flow on a Kanban board? Open the contact picker, switch the data source to CSV/vCard, tick your import, and the whole cohort joins the board:

Tailgate communities

Spinning up a Tailgate community? The Select Members screen offers the same source chips. One click and your imported contacts become the member list:

And beyond

The same source picker powers Courier (choose recipients for a secure file share), Tasky (connect people to task lists) and MessageHub (compose to a whole cohort). Import once: reuse everywhere.

Bring them all in

Your network is scattered across exports and address books; it doesn't have to stay that way. Import each file once, map it your way, and every one of those relationships becomes first-class in Trevally: searchable, organized, and ready to power your boards, communities and shares.

Connect your inbox for free, then bring the rest of your contacts in with them.