why is not incoming emails automatically imported to the leads etc. so they show up in the “Dashlet” and let you know there is a new email reply from a client/prospect?
Have anyone ever got this to work properly or do you all import incoming e-mails manually? 
Hey @PowerQuest thanks for starting a new thread.
The pre-requisite for emails to auto import is set the account as a “group” account. You then get the option to have auto importing of emails to known contacts.
Personal accounts do not import. I’m not 100% (I haven’t tested) if it will relate to a lead or just contacts.
Sorry missed your second question. I do both. I both import automatically in some cases and import manually in others.
For example… My support @ email imports automatically and creates a case.
My accounting@ email imports automatically, these are people responding to billing and invoicing emails.
My personal email me@… I import manually. I do this mainly because i CURATE my emails. If I was to import all of them, it becomes meaningless as I would have to search through dozens of emails to figure out what’s going on in a thread.
When you CURATE your emails, you only import the ones that you will want to refer to in the future.
For example… hey how’s it going, haven’t talked in a while…great…super busy… etc. You don’t need to import a bunch of relationship stuff back and forth.
For example… “Did you want to proceed with the quotation I sent you”… “Still working on approvals with my boss…” I’d import that, so when I look at the opportunity, I immediately know what the last status is.
Or collections, I want to record the number of times and when an invoice was followed up, just in case.
The other issue you run into with “auto import” is confidentiality.
I had a client recently who imported ALL emails from ALL Users from O365. Couple of problems with this…
When like 10 people are copied in and email and all work for the same company, 10 emails are imported and related to the deal. There end up being a hundred emails linked to an opportunity… again it becomes useless because there it too much.
The other issue is the lets say Dave, forwards a message to his boss that Sarah messed up the job and cost him the client. Now Sarah can perfectly read the email that’s related to the opportunity, when this was meant to be a private email. Ouch!
So… I normally recommend to clients a dual strategy. For general emails like support@ or sales@ (for incoming leads, etc) and accounting@, make them group emails and import them. For each individual user, I recommend curating the emails. It takes more time, but the end result is better information and a net time saving when you’re trying to actually understand what’s going on with a record.
PS - I put a fix on Github where you can create records like leads, opps, tasks, etc. right from your inbound email. It’s a real time saver.
@PowerQuest you inspired me to write a blog article on this topic… it’s a great topic for discussion.
Thanks a lot for the whole thread of information. It is very appreciated @pstevens !
Well I do get what you mean with curating emails e.g. being sort of picky and only importing what is most important/most relevant. The only issue with this and I’m speaking from personal expeience is that you can easily miss emails of importance as you are not notified about there there is an incoming email from a prospect/client XYZ.
When you have sales reps/account managers on the system they will potentially miss some emails because of this fact that private emails account isn’t imported automatically. I can see it as I do have my MS outlook configured with all emails of my company - but sales reps doesn’t. Sure one could use the CRM outlook plugin, but its not cheep and and comes with extra complexity of company security, having to also purchase additional software licenses for each sales rep of MS Office package, plus the CRM Outlook plugin license. It just easier and cheaper to not allowing sales staff to have that and just run everything in the CRM / Browser.
Most other CRM options - even the source of SuiteCRM, E.G. SugarCRM does allow automatically import of personal accounts and it makes sense I think for the reasons I described above. One size doesn’t always fit all or in this case fits all needs.
I wwold be really nice if SuiteCRM also offered the choice to be able to have automatically imports of all email accounts configured on the system.
As I can understand from your writing this is not a possible capability for now which is a bit of a shame. I do get the part of importing everything is not always a good thing, but on the other hand it isn’t that hard to delete a email that is not desirable to keep. But losing a client because you missed an important email because you did not get notified when it popped into your email inbox is a on the flipside and very undesirable thing and should of course be avoided at any price.
@PowerQuest Just make your personal account a group account and all your emails will be imported.
(they may not be linked specifically to what you want them to but, at least to the right contact)
But would not that then make it accessible to all other employees in your company?
E.g. employees can read from email from your inbox?
No, don’t give them access.
Ok, interesting.
I will have to test that one later then.
Thanks a bunch! 
Just because it’s a group account doesn’t mean everyone can see it. Only those who have access can see it.
ALL admins will be able to see it though. I’m assuming you’re the only admin.
Right, got it thanks.
I do have a issue though for long time with that if you are not an admin, but a normal crm user (e.g. employees), they cannot see the group inbox. So not sure if this would work for sales reps if this bug is still active in SuiteCRM.
I think I actually did posted a thread about this issue like three four weeks back about it. Maybe a but longer time ago. Never came to a real solution with that issue.
If you search the forum I posted a fix for that.
I will re-check that.
Thank you very much pstevens!
