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.

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

Always copy the address from the contract rather than typing it out. The domain differs depending on which Pactly region hosts your organization, so an address that is correct for one customer is not deliverable for another. The copy button always gives you the right one.

The part before the @ follows this pattern, which is useful for recognizing an address you already have:

{companykey}-{reference}

For example, an Acme contract with reference 2026-0043 starts acme-2026-0043. The parts are:

• Company key: a short identifier for your organization, set once by an administrator.
• Reference: the contract’s reference number.

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.

Every file the email carried is kept with it, and there are two ways to get one onto the contract: pick it yourself from the timeline, or let Pactly save it automatically on arrival.

The email event on the timeline carries a paperclip showing how many files came with the message. Open it to see all of them, whatever their type, then tick the ones you want and choose Copy to contract attachments. They are copied, so the email keeps its own copy of everything either way.

Because the list comes from the stored message rather than from what was saved on arrival, it shows files that automatic extraction never saves — images included.

Forwarded chains arrive with a lot of decoration: signature logos, letterhead, tracking pixels. So the list puts documents above images and the largest file first, and on a long email it folds the images the message itself displays behind a Show images link. Nothing is filtered away, and nothing is deleted — anything ranked down is one click from view.

Automatic extraction is off by default. With it off, nothing is saved to the contract on arrival — you copy what you need from the timeline instead. 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 to the contract automatically 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 attachments clean. You can still copy one from the timeline if it turns out to matter.
• 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.

An email carries up to 20 attachments into Pactly. If a message arrives with more, the email itself is still captured, and the first 20 attachments come with it.

• 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