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Comment by pcmaffey | Hacker News Reader

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…

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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)

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 :).

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.

Yeah, unfortunately Gmail…

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.

Just curious, when doing email sync, is spam/noize a problem? (I don't want to spend more time cleaning up mail)

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.

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.

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