Email and the CRM

Mail to and from contacts on their timeline: a logging address to BCC or forward to, writing to a contact from Alba, and the answers that come back.

Email with a contact belongs on their timeline with the calls and the meetings. There are two ways it gets there: you log mail you send and receive in your own mail program, or you write to the contact from Alba. Either way it is an email interaction on the contact, their company and, where there is one, the deal.

Logging, and the answers to what you write, need the workspace to receive email, which an administrator sets up under Administration, Email (see Email). Writing to a contact works without it.

Your logging address

Your account page shows your CRM logging address, with a button to copy it. Add it as a BCC when you write to a contact, or forward a message you received to it, and the message is logged:

• on every contact whose address is in From, To or Cc. A forwarded message names nobody but you there, so the addresses in the forwarded message's own heading are read instead;
• on a company, when an address is no contact's but its domain is the company's;
• on a deal, when the subject or the text names its key, such as SAL-12, and you may see the deal.

A message to several people is on each one's timeline, and once on a company's and a deal's however many of its people were written to.

The address is yours alone. It contains a code that stands for you, and mail is taken only when it comes from your own address: a message from anyone else is refused, and so is one the receiving mail server reports as forged. Treat the address as private all the same.

Addresses that are nobody's contact

A message is never turned into a contact by itself. An address the message names that is no contact's is listed under the interaction, as is not a contact, with Create contact for anyone who may edit the CRM: the contact is made with that address, a name taken from it for you to correct, and the company its domain names, and the email is then on their timeline too.

A message that matches no contact, no company and no deal has no timeline to go on. It is held, you are told in the bell which addresses it named, and once the contact exists you send it again.

Writing to a contact

Email on a contact's timeline, or on a deal's, opens a dialog with To (the contact's addresses, the primary first; on a deal, those of the deal's people and then its company's contacts), a subject and the message. Needs consent for says whether the message is one the person must have agreed to, such as marketing: see Email that needs consent. A company is written to through its people, so its own timeline has no such button.

The message goes from the workspace's sending address under your name, a moment after you press Send, and it is on the timeline at once, marked sending until the mail server has taken it. From a deal you can add files from the deal: its own attachments, up to 15 MB together. The deal's quote is sent from its own page. A person may send sixty emails an hour.

An email that was sent or received is a record of what it said: it can be deleted from the timeline, which is kept in the history, and it cannot be changed.

Answers from contacts

When the workspace receives email, an answer to a message you wrote here comes back to the timeline: on the same contact, the same company and the same deal, with the contact as its sender, and you are told in the bell and by email with your other notifications. The quoted message under an answer is left off; View original email downloads the whole message as it arrived. Only an answer from the person the message was written to, at any of their addresses, is taken.

When the workspace receives no email, answers go to your own address instead, and you log them with your logging address once it does.

Who sees logged mail

An email on a timeline is seen by the people who may see the CRM, like any other interaction, and one about a deal only by those who may see the deal. Customers never see any of it. The whole message, with its attachments, is kept in the workspace's own storage and is downloaded by the same people. Alba reads only the mail you send to your logging address and the answers to what you wrote here; it has no access to your mailbox.