Email in CRM: A Shared Team Inbox and Emails in Client Cards

Client emails usually live in reps' personal inboxes: someone goes on vacation and a request sits unanswered, someone quits and the correspondence leaves with the password. Email in CRM makes correspondence part of the client's history, and makes the department's shared inbox a shared job.

What is email in CRM

Email in CRM means your regular mailboxes connected to the system. Emails still go out from your address and through your mail server, but you see them where the client work happens: in the company card, next to calls and deals.

How to connect a mailbox

• Gmail and corporate email: via IMAP/SMTP. For Gmail, the server settings are filled in automatically; all you need is an app password.
• Microsoft 365 and Outlook: with a Sign in with Microsoft button, no passwords.
• Emails are sent through the mailbox's own SMTP server, from your domain, just as before.
• The CRM fetches new emails every 5 minutes.

A shared department inbox

A mailbox can be corporate or personal. A corporate one, such as sales@ or support@, is opened to an employee or a whole department. There are “View,” “Operator” and “Manage” roles, and replying, forwarding, downloading attachments and settings can each be enabled separately. For the whole department, it's convenient to set a single sender name, say, “Sales team.”

Nobody can see someone else's personal mailbox without explicit access, not even an administrator. The mailbox owner and everyone with access get a CRM notification about new emails, and each of them can turn it off.

Who answers an email

If you turn on the CRM link in the mailbox settings, emails are distributed automatically. An email from a known client is assigned to their owner, taken from the contact, company or lead. From an email sent by someone new, the CRM creates a lead or a contact and assigns it to reps in rotation; the rotation skips people who are away, have left the company or are blocked. A vCard attachment also turns into a contact.

Emails in the client card

The Mail tab of a company card collects emails from the addresses of the company and its contacts, from the mailboxes the employee has access to. A thread can be linked to a company, contact, deal or lead. You can write to the client right from the card, and the email is linked to it immediately.

From email to action

Any email can become a task, deal, contact or company in one click. You don't have to retype the client's request by hand: it becomes a CRM record together with the email itself.

Writing made easy

• An editor with formatting, links and images; several signatures per mailbox, including ones with a logo.
• AI-drafted replies and short summaries of long emails.
• Undo send within 10 seconds, scheduled sending and an out-of-office auto-reply.
• A blocklist for spam and pushy mailing lists.

How to set it up in 20 minutes

1. Connect the department's shared inbox: IMAP/SMTP or sign-in with Microsoft.
2. Open it to the department and choose roles: who only reads and who replies.
3. Turn on the CRM link for the mailbox so emails are distributed automatically.
4. Ask your reps to connect their personal work mailboxes, and client correspondence will appear in the cards.

We covered how emails fit into a client's overall history in our article on the client card.