Why don't all the people I've communicated with have a record in 4Degrees?

4Degrees strives to make your professional network useful and relevant.  To do that, we look for indicators of real engagement to avoid having your contact list cluttered with irrelevant records. 

A few of those indicators are explained below:

Communication thresholds

To avoid including people who send you spam or unsolicited emails on your contact list, our system creates contacts automatically only once a certain level of back and forth communication has occurred.  Our current thresholds are:

• You've sent at least one email sent AND received at least one email from a contact OR
• You've been in a meeting with that contact (i.e., their email address was included on the invite in a meeting you were a part of)
• You are the direct sender or receiver of the email (being cc'd on an email will not count towards creating a contact automatically)

Curation

Many of our users are on list servers, mass mailing lists, or calendar invites that include tens or hundreds of contacts that they do not know.  To avoid pulling in a large swath of contacts you don't know into your 4Degrees contacts, we automatically create contacts only if the group is small enough to warrant that belief (and if they've met the communication thresholds above).

Our current threshold for the group being "too large" for that belief to reliably hold is more than 5 others on the email or in the meeting.  

Note: In any of these cases, you can still add the contacts to your list manually in our Chrome extension, Outlook add-in, mobile apps, or on "Your Contacts" in the browser.