Import previous emails with new contacts

One of the things our users really like about Accelo is our automatic e-mail capture - now the left hand can know what the right is doing, and important sales, projects, and service e-mails between staff and clients are liberated from your inboxes.

But, to enable such an amazing automated feature, we also had to build in a pretty big safeguard - if an email comes in from a contact who's not already in the client database, the system ignores it. This way, personal e-mails, newsletters and spam don't end up being caught by accident.

This works fine, but can be a problem when you're e-mailing back and forth with a new contact who you haven't had time to put into Accelo yet. Of course once you've had a chance to add them to Accelo, all future e-mails will be captured, but what about the past ones?

Well there's good news about that too. If you're a Google Apps/Gmail user, we've just released a new feature which will allow you to import your entire e-mail conversation history that you've had with a contact, as soon as you add them to Accelo.

To turn on this feature, simply open up your Integrations screen and review the Google section. This setting/flag is checked on a per-user basis - since we're really cautious about importing people's e-mail histories without them knowing. This also means that we'll only import e-mails from the user who created the contact, and not from all other users. 

Things to Know

Though definitely worth the short wait, pulling in historical e-mails can take a while since in addition to retrieving e-mail conversations, we're also retrieving attachments, and then we have to reconstruct the conversations into our e-mail threads. We'd advise that you be patient, since this import is likely to take around 20 minutes to occur, depending on the size of the load on both the Accelo and Gmail servers.

When successfully completed, the import of e-mail history will create the diary entries and threaded conversations you're familiar with. We'll load them up against the company record, and if you want to move them to a specific sale, project or issue, you can take advantage of the "relocate" functionality.

Future Enhancements

In the future we'll be adding enhancements like being able to run the import manually (helpful if another team member added the contact and you want your history imported, as well as in situations where you don't want to import all e-mails for all contacts you create) and other improvements. We'd also love to hear your ideas - simply click on the lightbulb icon in Accelo and share your thoughts with us.