Email a Contract into Pactly

Negotiations happen over email, but those threads live outside the contract record. When a colleague picks up the file, they piece the history back together from forwarded messages and inbox searches, and the attachments that mattered are buried somewhere.

Every contract in Pactly has its own inbound email address. Forward an email to it, or CC it on an exchange, and the message lands on the contract timeline for everyone with access to see.

Every contract has a unique inbound address in this format:

{companykey}-{type}-{reference}@emailin.pactly.ai

For example: [email protected]

The parts are:

• Company key: a short identifier for your organization, set once by an administrator.
• Type: t for a contract drafted from a template, p for a playbook contract, e for an uploaded third-party contract.
• Reference: the contract’s reference number.

You find the address in the Metadata panel on the contract detail page. Click it to copy it to your clipboard.

To put an email on the timeline, do either of the following:

• CC the contract’s address on an email you are sending, or
• Forward an existing email to the contract’s address.

The message appears as a timeline event within a few minutes, with the sender, subject, body, and any attachments. Everyone with access to the contract can see it.

If Pactly cannot match the email to a contract, for example because the address was mistyped, it replies to the sender with a notice that the email could not be associated with a contract. Nothing is added to any timeline.

An inbound email can also flag the contract as Action Required for its owner, so new correspondence does not get missed. That trigger is described in Action Required.

The email itself is always captured. Attachments follow their own rules and are only saved as supporting documents when extraction is turned on.

Attachment extraction is off by default. With it off, attachments still appear as part of the email event on the timeline, but they are not saved as separate supporting documents. An administrator turns it on for the whole company from the Data > Email settings page, covered in Email Settings.

With extraction on, an attachment is saved as a supporting document unless it is one of two things:

• An image. Files like image/png or image/jpeg are skipped. Most images in email are signature logos and inline graphics, not documents, so filtering them keeps the contract’s supporting documents clean.
• The contract’s own document. Pactly embeds the contract’s identity inside every document it generates. If someone replies with that document attached, Pactly recognizes it and skips it to avoid a duplicate.

• Contract Timeline: how timeline events work, including captured emails
• Send Messages to External Parties: send tracked emails from inside a contract, with replies routed back in
• Action Required: flag contracts that need attention when new email arrives
• Email Settings: enable attachment extraction and other company email options
• Contracts overview