WhatsApp messages from contacts without a phone number

WhatsApp has started letting people identify themselves with a username instead of their phone number. When that happens, WhatsApp may not send us their number — and until now those messages never reached your inbox. They do now.

1. What changed

Previously, when someone with a username messaged you and WhatsApp didn't include their phone number, the message was lost: it never appeared in Chats, no contact was created, and no warning was raised anywhere. Neither you nor we had any way of knowing it had happened.

Now:

• The message reaches your inbox like any other.
• If it's the first time that person writes, their contact is created automatically, even though we don't have their number.
• You can reply from the conversation as usual, exactly as with any other contact.

There is nothing to switch on and no setting to change: it works this way on every account.

2. What a contact that arrives without a number looks like

The conversation behaves exactly like every other one. The difference is in the contact:

• The phone field is empty until we learn the number.
• The name you see is whatever the person has set in their WhatsApp profile. If they have no profile name, their username is used instead.
• The username refreshes on its own every time that person messages you, so it always reflects the one they're currently using.

The username is only there to help you recognise the person. It's never used to search, and never used to decide whether two contacts are the same person — that's done with the identifier WhatsApp assigns to that person within your account, which doesn't change when the username does.

3. When two contacts for the same person get merged

It's common for the same person to show up first without a number — because they wrote to you with a username — and later with their number visible. So that you don't end up with two contacts for one person:

• When that person writes again and their phone number does come through, we look for an existing contact with that number.
• If there is one, the contact created without a number is merged automatically into the one you already had, and the new message lands on that long-standing contact.
• If there isn't one, the phone number is simply filled in on the contact that already existed.

The automatic merge only happens when the contact without a number is one we created ourselves from an inbound WhatsApp message. A contact you created, imported, or received from your CRM is never merged on its own.

The case that isn't merged automatically

If the contact without a number already carries a different phone number, nothing is merged and neither contact is modified. That usually isn't a duplicate: it may be a shared phone, or a person who changed their number (WhatsApp issues a new identifier when that happens). In that case the message stays on the contact the identifier belongs to, and if they really are the same person, you can merge the two contacts by hand.

4. Conversations stay intact when contacts are merged

Merging two contacts no longer leaves the conversation half-finished. The surviving contact reflects the real state of the conversation:

• The last message and its date are taken from the most recent message across both contacts, not from just one of them.
• Unread messages from both are added together, so none drop off the count.
• WhatsApp's 24-hour window stays open if it was open on either side. Previously it could show as closed right after the person had just messaged you, which stopped you replying without using a template.

This applies to contact merges you do by hand too, not only to the automatic ones.

5. Details worth knowing

• Messages that can't be delivered no longer vanish silently. If a message arrives with neither a number nor an identifier, or something fails while processing it, it's recorded in our alerting systems so we can look into it. Previously none of them left any trace.
• WhatsApp calls work the same way. When someone answers whether they allow you to call them, that answer is saved on their contact even if they're identified only by a username.
• Call tasks won't succeed for a contact with no phone number. If your playbook expects a phone call for a contact who's only identified by a username, that call can't be placed — there's no number to dial, so the task shows up as "Completed without success," the same as a real unanswered call. If calling these contacts matters to your flow, you have two options: turn on WhatsApp calls (they work the same way for username-only contacts, see the point above), or ask the contact for their phone number during the conversation — it gets filled in automatically as soon as they share it.
• WhatsApp templates still need a phone number. If your account uses templates to start a conversation outside the 24-hour window, those templates still require a phone number. For a contact that only has a username, you can reply inside the open conversation as normal.
• If you have HubSpot connected, a contact with no phone and no email is no longer mistakenly attached to an arbitrary contact in your HubSpot: a new one is created with their name.

Relevant scenarios

• Teams handling high WhatsApp volume. The more people message you, the likelier it is that some of them use a username. Until this change, that share of messages was lost without a trace, so it never surfaced as a problem in any report — there were simply fewer conversations than there should have been. If your inbound volume looked slightly lower than expected, you may now see the figure rise.
• Campaigns where the contact messages first. In click-to-WhatsApp ad campaigns, the person writes before you hold any of their details. That first conversation is now always kept, and their number fills in on its own as soon as WhatsApp sends it.
• Accounts carrying many duplicates. If you'd been accumulating repeated contacts for the same person, the automatic merge reduces how often that keeps happening for this reason.

Conclusion

No WhatsApp message is lost any more just because the person identifies themselves with a username instead of a phone number. They reach your inbox, you can reply to them, and once their phone number becomes known later on, their contact merges itself with the one you already had. There's nothing to configure.