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I was researching CRMs recently and could not find a single one that offered imap or pop3 integration. Which means you have to bcc every outgoing email and forw

I was researching CRMs recently and could not find a single one that offered imap or pop3 integration. Which means you have to bcc every outgoing email and forward every incoming one just to achieve a conversation history within the context of CRM data. On the flipside I couldn’t find either an email client that offered minimal CRM features to be able to do this well either. I just want to open a contact and see entire history plus any notes, tags, data Ive added…

itsmemattchung 5y ago
I noticed the same thing. Due to shaky imap/pop3 integration with a lot of CRMs, I ended up writing my own Greasemonkey script that would push both outbound and inbound e-mails to my own personal crm.
waterside81 5y ago
That doesn't strike me as being entirely true, unless I misunderstand your needs? Hubspot does this - my sales guys send emails via Google, I see everything in Hubspot. Prior to Hubspot we used Close.io - same thing. Every email sent (and every reply) showed up in Close.io in the context of the contact(s). As for IMAP tags etc. - yes I've never seen that. Although you can probably use Streak for that (streak.com)
- cbnotfromthere 5y ago
  May I ask you why you switched from one to another? I'm actually evaluating both for our company and your feedback would be great.
drikerf 5y ago
Interesting! I like bcc because it has minimal footprint and you can setup most popular clients to automatically bcc an address if you want all emails to go there. I've just added my bcc mailbox as a contact since I don't want all my email in my CRM :).
alooPotato 5y ago
There are a few CRMs that do what you describe. Streak (I'm the founder) connects to Gmail's APIs to automatically index the conversation history of contacts you've added. We go one step further and also show you the conversation history between your contacts and anyone on your team, not just you.
- pcmaffey 5y ago
  Yeah, unfortunately Gmail…
indymike 5y ago
One of the most popular, Zoho CRM has had that from the beginning. Pipedrive has it as well. Often CRMs call the IMAP feature "email sync" so the CIO at the customer doesn't go nuts about working around Outlook.
- mgbmtl 5y ago
  Just curious, when doing email sync, is spam/noize a problem? (I don't want to spend more time cleaning up mail)
  - indymike 5y ago
    That is really a feature of your email provider. I've used gmail and an old style shared server email, and in both cases, spam was filtered by the email provider.

itsmemattchung 5y ago

I noticed the same thing. Due to shaky imap/pop3 integration with a lot of CRMs, I ended up writing my own Greasemonkey script that would push both outbound and inbound e-mails to my own personal crm.

waterside81 5y ago

That doesn't strike me as being entirely true, unless I misunderstand your needs? Hubspot does this - my sales guys send emails via Google, I see everything in Hubspot. Prior to Hubspot we used Close.io - same thing. Every email sent (and every reply) showed up in Close.io in the context of the contact(s). As for IMAP tags etc. - yes I've never seen that. Although you can probably use Streak for that (streak.com)

cbnotfromthere 5y ago
May I ask you why you switched from one to another? I'm actually evaluating both for our company and your feedback would be great.

drikerf 5y ago

Interesting! I like bcc because it has minimal footprint and you can setup most popular clients to automatically bcc an address if you want all emails to go there. I've just added my bcc mailbox as a contact since I don't want all my email in my CRM :).

alooPotato 5y ago

There are a few CRMs that do what you describe. Streak (I'm the founder) connects to Gmail's APIs to automatically index the conversation history of contacts you've added. We go one step further and also show you the conversation history between your contacts and anyone on your team, not just you.

pcmaffey 5y ago
Yeah, unfortunately Gmail…

indymike 5y ago

One of the most popular, Zoho CRM has had that from the beginning. Pipedrive has it as well. Often CRMs call the IMAP feature "email sync" so the CIO at the customer doesn't go nuts about working around Outlook.

mgbmtl 5y ago
Just curious, when doing email sync, is spam/noize a problem? (I don't want to spend more time cleaning up mail)
- indymike 5y ago
  That is really a feature of your email provider. I've used gmail and an old style shared server email, and in both cases, spam was filtered by the email provider.