Hi Barchard. Not sure if you got this figtured out yet, I see it's been a couple months.

Your request is almost certainly being rejected at the validation layer before the contact is created. There are two things to check:

The PartyType field is required on every POST /public/people request but isn't included in your call. Without it, the API cannot create the contact. Add one of the following to your request body:

text

--data-urlencode 'PartyType=Individual'

or

text

--data-urlencode 'PartyType=Company'

Your ContactEmail value contains a literal @ character. Per the docs, special characters in form values must be URL-encoded before sending — @ should be encoded as %40. When using --data-urlencode, curl handles encoding automatically if you pass the value in key=value format, so double-check that the @ isn't being dropped or misinterpreted.

Corrected request:

bash

curl -i -X POST \

'https://sandbox.api.portal.io/public/people' \

-H 'Accept: application/json' \

-H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \

-H 'X-MSS-API-APPID: YOUR_APP_ID' \

-H 'X-MSS-API-USERKEY: YOUR_USER_KEY' \

-H 'X-MSS-CUSTOM-DATE: Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:22:19 GMT' \

-H 'X-MSS-SIGNATURE: BASE64_SIGNATURE' \

--data-urlencode 'PartyType=Individual' \

--data-urlencode 'ContactType=Customer' \

--data-urlencode 'ContactCategory=Residential' \

--data-urlencode 'FirstName=Test' \

--data-urlencode 'LastName=Contact' \

--data-urlencode 'CompanyName=Test Company' \

--data-urlencode 'ContactEmail=test@example.com' \

--data-urlencode 'ContactPhone=123-555-1234'

A successful 200 response will return the full contact record including the assigned id. Once you see that id in the response, your GET /public/people?SearchText=... lookup should work as expected.

Let us know if you're still not seeing the contact after making those changes!