Connecting Gmail or Outlook
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Settings → Email
Each person connects their own mailbox. Analysts, admins and owners can; viewers cannot. You can only send from a mailbox you connected yourself.
Connecting
- Open Settings → Email.
- If you want the last year's contacts as well, tick Also import contacts from the last 12 months first.
- Select Connect Gmail or Connect Outlook.
- Sign in with Google or Microsoft and approve access.
A button that is greyed out means the server has not been given that provider's credentials — an administrator issue, not something you can fix.
What a connected mailbox does
Adds the people you email to the CRM. Every few minutes new mail is checked. From mail you receive, the sender plus everyone in To and Cc. From mail you send, everyone in To, Cc and Bcc. Each person is found by email address or created, then linked to the company whose domain matches, creating that company if it does not exist.
Logs those emails on their records. A contact's page lists the emails with that person; a company's page lists its contacts'. How much of each email colleagues see is a firm-wide setting — see What the rest of the firm sees.
Lets you send from a record, from your own address. See Writing and sending.
Only new mail is read, unless you import.
Importing the last 12 months
Import last 12 months brings in everyone from the past year's sent and received mail, with the same filters applied.
It runs in the background in chunks with a progress bar. A busy mailbox can take up to an hour. If it stops — expired access, or repeated provider errors — Resume import continues from where it left off rather than starting again. Provider rate limits are waited out automatically.
While an import runs, the routine check for that mailbox is skipped, so the two do not compete.
You cannot import further back than 12 months.
The other controls
| Add people to CRM | Turn off for send-only. Turning it back on resumes from new mail, not the gap |
| Check now | Queues a check immediately, usually within a minute |
| Reconnect | For a mailbox marked Needs reconnect, when access expired or was revoked |
| Disconnect | Stops reading and sending, and deletes our copy of the access |
Disconnecting keeps the history. Contacts it added and emails it logged stay in the CRM, still attributed to that person and still under the firm's visibility level. So when somebody leaves, their correspondence history is not lost. Connecting the same address again picks it back up from new mail.
What gets picked up, and what is skipped
Owners and admins set this under Filters. Everyone else can see it.
Who becomes a contact: everyone you exchange mail with, or only people somebody here has written to. The second keeps notification senders out — a stranger becomes a contact the moment you reply.
Four switches, all on by default:
- Skip no-reply and notification senders
- Skip newsletters and mailing lists — turn this off if bankers send teasers through mass-mail tools, or you will quietly lose deal flow
- Skip auto-replies
- Skip Gmail's Promotions, Social and Forums tabs
Blocked domains and addresses, one per line, up to 500. Blocking a domain also blocks its subdomains.
Some things are always skipped whatever you set: mail flagged as spam, likely spoofed mail, your own team, recipients of emails sent to more than twenty people, and the spam, trash, drafts and outbox folders.
Filters apply to mail checked after saving. Contacts already added are not removed.
People writing from personal addresses become contacts with no company attached.
How people and companies are matched
Contacts match on email address, ignoring case. An existing contact is never renamed or overwritten.
Companies match on the sender's domain against the account's Domains and Website fields, with subdomains counting as the parent domain. A new company is named from the domain. An existing contact with no company gets linked; one that already has a company is left alone.
What you cannot do yet
- Open or download an attachment on a logged email. Names are listed; the files stay in the mailbox.
- Read the body of an email logged before its mailbox had permission for bodies.
- Allow-list one sender that a filter skips.
- Remove contacts added before a domain was blocked, other than by hand.