More control of email capture with aliases

One of Accelo's most popular features is its automatic email capture - any time you, or one of your team, send or receive an email to or from a client, it will automatically get picked up and indexed in Accelo.

However, there is one drawback - when an email is captured and it isn't in reply to an activity you created in Accelo first, we don't know where to store it, so we put it against the company/contact directly. Additionally, if you recieved an important email from someone who wasn't in Accelo and you wanted to capture it - and its attachments - against a sale, project, issue, etc, there was no way to just forward it across and have it captured, until now.

Today we're announcing a new feature which will allow you to have more control over where conversations in Accelo are linked, using special email addresses which are uniquely tied to a single object in Accelo.

Unique Addresses for Sales, Projects, Issues and more

This new feature works by allowing you to use a specific, dedicated email address, to make sure your email conversations are logged against the particular sale, project, issue, contract or invoice. 

Each object's dedicated email address is in the form of
[object-type]+[object-id]@yourdomain.accelo.com. 

The currently supported, object-type values are:

• Sales - you can use 'prospect', 'sale', 'deal' or 'opportunity' as the object-type keyword, eg: [email protected]
• Projects - you can use 'project' or 'job' as the object-type keyword, eg: [email protected]
• Components - you can use 'component,' or 'milestone,' as the object-type keyword, eg: [email protected]
• Issues - you can use 'issue,' 'case,' or 'ticket' as the object-type keyword, eg: [email protected]
• Contract - you can use 'contract' or 'retainer' as the object-type keyword, eg: [email protected]
• Invoice - you can use 'invoice' or 'bill' as the object-type keyword, eg: [email protected]

To find the object-id, you'll need to either turn on IDs in the General Settings area, or alternatively look in the address bar for the id value, when you're looking at the sale, project, retainer or other object, as shown in the screenshot below.

For modules that support custom-id values (currently just issues and invoices support this), you can also use your custom ID (as long as the custom-ID doesn't make the email address invalid).

Example 1 - Linking a Conversation to a Project

Imagine that you're currently working on a big project for your client, South River Systems. This client emails you pretty frequently, and because they're often the one starting a conversation, the conversation is indexed against their client record in Accelo, instead of the project.

To help file things in the right place and to make it easier to convert the time your team spends on these emails into billable time through the Work Screen, you really want these conversations to go against the project. Using this new feature, you'd be able to do this quickly and easily.

1. Create a new address book entry for the project in your Outlook or Google Contacts system (wherever you email from), called "South River Big Project" or whatever makes sense to you.
2. Give the contact an email address of "[email protected]", where the number '2109' is whatever the project ID is, inside of Accelo.
3. When you reply to the client, just BCC in, this special address, and Accelo will automatically index the conversation against the project instead of against the company.
4. As a bonus, Accelo will also automatically move all of the previous emails that were captured as part of the same thread to this special address.

Of course, this feature is most useful for long-lived projects or places where you're doing a bunch of work; you can always easily relocate indexed emails on an ad-hoc basis from the Work Screen, for those things that don't deserve their own entry in your address book.

Example 2 - Forwarding an important email to a Project

Imagine that you're working on a project and you get an email from a supplier with some key information you want to store against the project. The supplier might not be in Accelo - perhaps it is an order confirmation email - so normally the email wouldn't be captured.

In this case, you can use the new alias feature to forward an email, any email, and have it get captured in Accelo. This is how.

 

1. Find the ID of the project in Accelo. In this example, imagine it is project 2109 again.
2. Open the email you want to forward across in your email client, and choose "Forward". The address to forward it to will be [email protected].

Within minutes, the email - including any attachments - will be forwarded across and captured in Accelo against that project.

We really hope you like this new feature, and if you have any comments or questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected].