How can I delete a contact?

[SaizFerri]

Either via UI or API, is there a way to delete a contact?

[yudin-s]

There does not appear to be an exposed contact-delete action in the current contact handlers.

The contact path supports listing/getting contacts, updating contact fields, adding/deleting contact notes, and toggling the contact's enabled/blocked state. I do not see a matching UI/API route for deleting the contact record itself.

For now, use block/disable if the goal is to stop interaction with that contact. If you need removal for cleanup or privacy reasons, I would open a feature request and spell out what should happen to related conversations, messages, notes, and history: hard-delete, anonymize, or keep them with a deleted-contact placeholder.

I would avoid direct database deletion unless you have checked those relationship/history effects.

[SaizFerri]

My issue is that I configured my inbox wrongly on the first attempt so it created and mapped a bunch of contacts that should not be in the system. I would need a way to delete everything related to them, it can cascade drop relations, emails and so on.

[yudin-s]

That is a different case from just blocking a contact: you need an import rollback / hard-delete path.

I still would not treat this as supported from the UI today. The contact handlers expose list/get/update, notes, and block/enable behavior, but not a contact-delete action. In the schema, contacts are users rows with contact/visitor type, and some related data does cascade from users(id) - for example conversations via contact_id and contact notes via contact_id. But there are enough related tables around conversations, messages, assignments, logs, and inbox state that I would not run ad-hoc SQL from the UI assumption alone.

The safest options are:

1. If this was an initial wrong setup and there is no real data to preserve, restore a database backup/snapshot from before the inbox sync, or reset the deployment/database volume and configure the inbox correctly before syncing again.
2. If you need to keep other data, ask for a maintainer-supported cleanup/migration path. The cleanup should identify the wrongly imported contacts by a precise criterion, review the affected conversations/messages count, run inside a backed-up DB transaction, and then verify the remaining inbox data.
3. Use block/disable only as a temporary containment step. It will stop/limit use of those contacts, but it is not the same as deleting the imported records and their related history.

If a maintainer confirms that deleting the relevant contact users rows is supported for this case, the foreign-key cascades may do a lot of the cleanup, but I would want that project confirmation before relying on it in production.

[jleroy]

I think this is related to #244