People

Your mail and calendar are mostly about people. Maisnie keeps one note per person in your vault, in Entities/People/, and links every mail thread and meeting to the people in it, but it never decides on its own who someone is. It proposes; you decide.

The connectors themselves still only link to a person you already have a note for (see connect your accounts). What this page covers is how those notes come to exist, gain addresses, and become one note when two of them turn out to be the same person.

Where you meet it

People, in the masthead, lists everyone Maisnie has met so far: search it by name or address. Open anyone to see their page: their addresses, when you were last in touch, and every mail thread and meeting they are in, newest first. On a mail thread or meeting page, a participant’s name links straight to their person page when Maisnie already knows who they are.

Whenever there is something to decide, Home shows a People to review card with how many are waiting, and a Review button that takes you there. It shows you one question at a time, in plain words, with the evidence underneath it, never a list to plough through.

What Maisnie proposes

Maisnie reads your mail threads and meetings and notices three kinds of thing. Each is shown to you as a question, with its evidence in plain words (which notes, how many of them, and when you last heard from that address) and the notes themselves, newest first.

• Someone new. An address that has turned up in at least two of your notes, used with a real name, that no person note has yet. “Add Dana Whitfield ([email protected]) to People?” You can change the name before the note is created.
• Another address for someone you have. A new address used under exactly the name of one of your people, where something besides the name agrees: it’s at the same domain as an address they already have, or it writes with the same people they do. This is always asked as a question and marked as less certain, because anyone can type any name into a mail program: “Is [email protected] also Dana Whitfield?”
• Two notes for one person. Two person notes that list the same address, or that carry the same full name, share an email domain, write with the same people, and never appear together in one conversation. “Are Tom Ferreira and Tomas Ferreira the same person?”

What it never proposes:

• A merge on a first name alone, or on any one-word name. Two Danas are two people.
• A person for an automated or shared mailbox: noreply@, notifications@, calendar-notification@, mailer-daemon@, support@, info@, a newsletter, and the like.
• A person whose “name” is really an email address, or who has no name at all.
• Anything you’ve already answered.

Names are compared the way a person would compare them: extra spaces, stray quotes around a name, and a relaying service’s “(via …)” suffix don’t make two names different, and neither does letter case in an address.

Deciding

Each proposal has the choices that fit it:

• Approve: create the person, add the address, or merge the two notes. For a merge, you choose which note to keep; a line under the choice says what Approve will do and that you can undo it.
• Reject: no, and don’t ask again.
• Not the same person (for an address or a merge): these are different people, and Maisnie will never suggest putting them together again, however much more evidence turns up.

Every answer is final in the sense that matters: Maisnie never asks the same question twice. If you create a person and later delete their note, Maisnie won’t propose them again either.

What changes in your vault

Only person notes, and only the ones a decision is about. Your mail threads and meeting notes are never moved, rewritten or deleted: they’re the evidence, and they stay exactly as they arrived.

• Creating writes one new note in Entities/People/, named for the person. If a note with that name is already there, nothing is written and Maisnie says so; pick a different name.
• Adding an address changes two lines of that one note, its list of emails and the date it was last changed, and leaves everything else in it exactly as you wrote it.
• Merging keeps the note you chose and gives it the other note’s addresses, other names and sources. The other note stays where it is, with its own text, marked as merged and pointing at the one you kept, so any link to the old name still takes you to the right person.

Adding and removing a person by hand

You don’t have to wait for a question. Add a person on the People page asks for a name and, if you have one, an email. It writes the same note an approved question writes. If that name is already a person, or the email already belongs to someone, nothing is added and the page says so.

Remove this person, at the foot of a person’s page, asks once more (“Yes, remove”) before it does anything. If notes were merged into them earlier, the page names those too. The person and those notes are set aside together in one folder under .maisnie/people/removed/ inside your vault, with a manifest.json listing each file and its checksum. Nothing is deleted. Maisnie won’t suggest that person again from the same email addresses. If someone with the same name writes from a new address, Maisnie asks once more and says you removed someone with that name, with a Not them either button that settles it. The Decisions list says “Removed by you”, with an Undo button that puts every note back exactly as it was. Undo refuses, and moves nothing, if one of the notes is in People again or has changed. Your mail threads and meeting notes are not touched.

Undoing a merge

Right after you approve a merge, the confirmation says what happened in plain words and carries an Undo button that names what it will do, such as “Undo: put Tom Ferreira and Tomas Ferreira back as two people.” The People page also has its own Decisions list, newest first: one plain sentence per merge you’ve made, such as “Merged Tom Ferreira into Tomas Ferreira on 24 Sep.” Beside it, an Undo button when Maisnie can put it back exactly, both notes restored byte for byte to what they held right before the merge, the redirect gone, and the pair settled as “not the same person,” so Maisnie won’t suggest merging them again. One click is all it takes, and nothing is asked twice.

Undo only ever offers itself when it can be exact. If either note has changed since (you edited it, or something else merged into it meanwhile) the button says so instead of guessing, and nothing is touched; the merge stays, and the sentence below names which note changed. The same is true of a merge from before this existed, which carries only what it takes to undo by hand (next).

Where your decisions are kept

In your vault, in a hidden folder: .maisnie/people/decisions.ndjson, one line per decision, only ever added to. Because it lives in the vault, copying or backing up the vault folder carries your decisions with it (see backup). Maisnie’s search and note pages never show this folder. Undoing a merge adds a new line of its own: the log is never edited, only ever appended to, so your history of what you decided, and when, always stays complete.

For a merge, that line also records both notes exactly as they were before, which is what it takes to undo it by hand when the Decisions list can’t offer Undo: copy each note’s earlier text back into its file.