Easier Privacy & Smarter Sharing with Accelo's Email Magic

Today we released two new email automation features for all Accelo accounts - the ability to control privacy as you write an email, and the ability to more intelligently bring your colleagues into the loop when you're working on sales, projects, tickets or retainers they care about.

Setting Visibility through Content

When Accelo automatically tracks an email (saving it as an Activity), we make use of strong Privacy settings - so if you have a private or confidential relationship with the person you're sending an email to (or receiving an email from), we'll use those privacy settings when saving the Activity.

While this model works well for situations where we know in advance that the email traffic between you and a contact is going to be sensitive and worth limiting access to, it isn't ideal in situations where you aren't sure if you set it up already and you're in a rush to send something that does have sensitive content.

To make it easier for you and your colleagues to control visibility at the time you write your emails, we've introduced a new way to set visibility based on keywords that you include in the Subject or Body of the email.

Subject Keywords

When you write an email, if you include the words Private, Personal or Secret in the subject of the email, Accelo will always save that email as Visibility=Private. This means that the recipients of the email will even be able to see that the Activity exists - everyone else in the company will not even know it happened.

Examples of email subjects that will be automatically marked as Private from today include:

• Private Sale Update
• Medical status (personal)
• Acquisition Offers - secret

Similarly, when you include the words Confidential or Sensitive in the subject of the email, Accelo will always save that email as Visibility=Confidential. This means that other people in your Accelo account will be able to see that there was a communication between you and the clients/colleagues you emailed, but they won't be able to see any content at all - no subject, no body.

Examples of email subjects that will be automatically marked as Confidential from today include:

• Confidential: Quarterly bonus
• Billy's performance (sensitive)

A few things to keep in mind with these subject keywords:

• You don't need to wrap them in brackets or any other syntax. There isn't a lot of space in a subject normally, so we wanted to make it possible for you to just write these words in naturally.
• They do need to be their own words. So, if you had a subject of "New secrets from the Pharoes" then it would not match - secret is not the same as secrets.
• They can exist anywhere in the subject, and in any upper or lower-case. You can put them at the front, at the back, in the middle, even wrap them in brackets like [PRIVATE] if you want - we'll match any of these.

Body Keywords

Similar to the Subject Keywords, we also look through all of the body text of an email (usually skipping the previous message and any disclaimer/signature text we find) to find special keywords to determine if your activity should be Private or Confidential. 

Unlike Subjects, however, which only have a few, deliberate words, the body content of an email could quite reasonably have keywords like "Private" and "Sensitive" without the author intending the whole email to be considered as something to restrict visibility on.

With this in mind, Accelo's method of detecting if the body has a magic keyword involves a little more deliberate work - you need to wrap the same keywords as above, but with (parentheses), [square brackets] or {curly braces}.

Examples of the keywords you'd want to include in the body of your email to trigger the automatic visibility setting include:

• Private visibility in Accelo happens when we find strings/phrases like:
• [Private], (Private) or {Private}, in any combination of upper or lower case.
• [Secret], (Secret) or {Secret}, in any combination of upper or lower case.
• [Personal], (Personal) or {Personal}, in any combination of upper or lower case.
• Confidential visibility in Accelo happens when we find strings/phrases like:
• [Confidential], (Confidential) or {Confidential}, in any combination of upper or lower case.
• [Sensitive], (Sensitive) or {Sensitive}, in any combination of upper or lower case.

The intent with these brackets is to make it hard for you to accidentally set visibility through normal email conversations (eg, "We need to make sure we get a NDA signed before we share sensitive information"), but still have them look smart enough that you wouldn't be overly embarrassed to include them (we imagine many folks will want to include them as almost a PS line at the bottom of the email)

*A reminder also that Accelo will not save the Attachments on any Private or Confidential emails. 

Intelligently Including Managers/Owners 

The other important improvement we shipped today is a new optional feature in Accelo that can help bring your colleagues into the conversation around your client work even more easily than ever.

Today, when an Accelo user (for example, Jim) creates an Activity (for example, against a Project) and sends that activity To a colleague (say, Sally), Accelo will automatically look for the manager/owner of the project (say, Tom) and any account-managers for the client the project is for (such as Rebecca and Angela) and will then automatically CC Tom, Rebecca and Angela on Jim's activity email to Sally. 

The advantage of this is that the other people who care about the project are automatically in the loop, and they're also in control of whether they get these notifications at all via their own user preferences (the screenshot below shows you the level of control for toggling on and off these email notifications).

While this works really well, the problem we've had until today is when Sally, Tom, Rebecca or Angela reply to Jim's email: it will be captured in Accelo, but only Jim will get the email-reply, leaving the others in the dark.

From today, every Accelo deployment has a new admin configuration setting under the "Activities & Emails" area which will allow you to turn on the automatic inclusion of managers on these emails replies so they work exactly the same when processed via email capture as they do when created via the Accelo activity interface.

The preferences of each individual will be obeyed in the same way as they are in the sending of activities via Accelo normally, and we'll also make sure we don't automatically include recipients as CC/BCC folks if the email is Private or Confidential. Additionally, we're only bringing this functionality to life for emails captured against a Sale, Project, Ticket, Retainer or another work object in Accelo - this means that a casual conversation (which lives by default on the Client Contact) won't be automatically CC'ed to colleagues.