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Saving Emails in Salesforce: An Overview

 

The basis of LinkPoint Connect(ME) functioning is carrying out special interactions between MS Exchange/Office 365 or Google mail/calendar and Salesforce through data transfer and synchronization between their matching objects’ fields. One of the key features of LinkPoint Connect(ME) is saving (sharing) emails/events as records in Salesforce and modifying them directly via the Sidebar. This article provides a detailed overview of the mechanisms involved in saving email messages in Salesforce.

 

Primary Emails Processing

An email received or sent in MS Exchange/Office 365 or Gmail consists of the following elements: the sender’s email address, the recipients’ email addresses (the To, CC, and BCC lines), the date and time of sending, the email’s subject line, message body and its formatting , the sender’s signature, and the files attached to the email. When LinkPoint Connect(ME) for Salesforce processes a message opened in MS Outlook, it obtains all this data from MS Exchange/Gmail and based on the email address determines whether the message is internal or blocklisted from Salesforce synchronization and finds in Salesforce the records related to it based on the senders’ and recipients’ addresses extracted. Please refer to this article to learn more about these filtering mechanisms.

Emails classified as internal/blocklisted (see the article linked above) are not saved in Salesforce automatically and besides the Save button in LinkPoint Connect(ME) Sidebar is disabled for them. When such message is opened, to indicate why the message cannot be saved in Salesforce there appears a notification under Smart Actions > More… > Observations “Some not important emails were filtered:” with the list of internal or blocklisted email addresses the message contains.

>>> Click to see a screenshot <<<

 

Refer to this article to learn how to save such emails in Salesforce without removing their addresses/domains from the blocklist.

Note

If the message’s full addresses list contains at least one non-internal/blocklisted email address, the message will be saveable in Salesforce as a brand new record or as one linked to associated existing records

 

 

“Under the hood” mechanisms and special patterns applied on Emails saving

1. When a message is opened in LinkPoint Connect(ME), the Add-In / Chrome Extension retrieves the described above message elements from MS Exchange/Gmail. Besides the email addresses, useful data from the message’s signature (name, surname, position, phone number, company name and website address, etc.) as well as email addresses, links, or phone numbers contained in message body are extracted and used to search for related records in the next step.

 

2. Next, Related records search in Salesforce is performed to determine if there has been previous communication (that is, saved Salesforce records) related to message sender/recipients and other contact data found in the message. Furthermore, at this step LinkPoint Connect(ME) obtains relevant contextual information about the message to be displayed in the Sidebar and put in prefilled record fields, if related records are found.

 

3. LinkPoint Connect(ME) synchronization only handles emails located in the Inbox, Sent and custom Salesforce folders of MS Outlook, it will not process emails assigned the Salesforce category but located in other folders. The same concerns the Save button, it’s only available for items in these MS Outlook folders.

 

4. Unlike calendar items syncing, emails saving and auto-saving is always a one-way MS Exchange/Gmail → Salesforce process; saving of an individual email is only performed once, unless you delete its matching entry in Salesforce, and its content is not synchronized in any way in the future. For example, if you modify a Task/Email message Salesforce object based on an email message, these changes do not get down-synchronized to your MS Exchange/Office 365 or Gmail and only remain in Salesforce.
There is also a special custom scenario where a saved email gets deleted from Salesforce to allow editing its Body via the Sidebar. See this section of the article for complete information

 

5. Emails categories which do not get auto-saved if the corresponding Sync setting is on:

 

6. The Add-In / Chrome Extension does not work with Service emails

Service email messages cannot be saved in Salesforce or processed in any way, so the Add-In / Chrome Extension cannot be opened for the following types of emails:

When an email of this kind is selected in MS Outlook Desktop or On the Web version, the Open LinkPoint Connect(ME) icon and related icons are greyed out in LinkPoint Connect(ME) Cloud (Web) implementation; the Sidebar is automatically closed for such emails in LinkPoint Connect(ME) desktop/MSI implementation.

 

7. The is also a special synchronization setting available on request that enables autosaving of outbound emails only. Note that enabling this option does not exclude the possibility to save non-outbound emails using the Save button.

 

8. Note that emails which you have saved in Salesforce using the Save button or via any other method are auto-assigned the custom blue Salesforce category in MS Outlook or the Salesforce label in Gmail, so you can see if you have already processed it. However, that may happen within 1-30 minutes after saving, since categories get assigned by LPC Sync.

LinkPoint Connect(ME) can also be used to save emails from a Shared Outlook mailbox.

 

 

Editing already saved Email Messages via the Sidebar

In the latest updates, it is possible to edit the fields of already saved Enhanced Email messages via the Sidebar: SFDC records linked to email (Related To): both WhatID People Records and WhoID Business Records, Subject, Body, and some other key ones. In this scenario, the email gets deleted and then re-created in Salesforce.

To edit an already saved Email Message in Salesforce:

  • Select the corresponding email in MS Outlook
  • Click on Email is saved in the Sidebar’s header
  • Edit the fields as needed by clicking the 🖉 (Edit) icon next to them
  • Click the Save button in the dialog to apply the changes in Salesforce

Tip

Note that you can revert the changes by clicking the ⟲ (Undo) icon next to a changed field

 

Note

In order to edit a saved EmailMessage, you should have sufficient access permissions: be the email’s Owner allowed to delete objects of this type from Salesforce.

 

 

The Magic Anchor feature (used to synchronize emails sent from Salesforce)

In addition, LinkPoint Connect(ME) can be configured to auto-link replies to emails you send from Salesforce to a single relevant Contact or Lead - only when the item is handled by sync. Contact us if emails sending from Salesforce is often used in your Org and you want to have the recipients’ replies linked to a single relevant Contact / Lead. Note this feature is available only for Enterprise customers.

 

 

Linking a saved email to a Contact and a Support Case at the same time

LPC can link emails saved as Salesforce Tasks to a Contact and a Support Case at the same time, according to user selections in Save email dialog. To perform that, the following Salesforce configuration prerequisite is required:

 

 

Saving any emails without linking them

For special emails saving scenarios requested by some Enterprise customers, LinkPoint Connect(ME) also offers the possibility to save any emails with no established relation to any Salesforce records. That is, on creation of the matching Tasks or EmailMessages in Salesforce their WhoId and WhatId fields are left blank. To enable this function, submit a corresponding request to our Support team.

 

 

 

Please proceed to the next section of this article to learn how to save an email in Salesforce from LinkPoint Connect(ME):

Saving Emails in Salesforce: 2. Ways to save an Email

Also refer to this article for detailed information on how MS Outlook/Exchange Email and Salesforce Task/Email message fields are matched when an email message is saved in Salesforce via LinkPoint Connect(ME).

   

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