We get a lot of support calls about the Vtiger mail converter. Many people use it as part of Vtiger ticket processing, but there is a lot of confusion about pulling in emails to link to contacts/leads/organizations. Here are some things to know.
- You can create a mail converter for your email account and pull all your emails into vtiger linked to the appropriate contacts/leads/organizations
- It may be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway; if the contact/lead/organization record is not created yet in Vtiger or the email address does not match what you have in vtiger, the email will not be written to the data base.
- If the email is marked read before the mail converter gets to it, it will skip it. The mail converter will mark the email as read, so this can be confusing.
- A better approach is to create another email account and using your email account management tools, send a copy of all your email to your new account. Use this new account when you set up the converter.
- You can link your outbound emails by creating a separate account for that and setting up a mail converter to pull those in. Depending on you email provider’s capabilities it can be difficult to get your outgoing emails bcc’s to the account you created. Let us know if you need help with that.
- Bad VT Design: when the email is created and linked in vtiger the email assigned to is always set to the contact/lead/organization record assigned to user. So you have to open the email to see which user sent / received it
- Bad VT Design 2: In each email related list, the emails are sorted with the oldest at the top.
- Bad VT Design 3: If the email does not match anything, it is not written to the data base and you lose the chance to link it.
- Good VT Design: the emails typically link with contacts, but if you go to the email related list in organizations, you can see all the emails for the contacts that are liked to the org and you can see which contact they are linked to.
It is worth noting that Boru has an Email Linker that is easier to use and corrects the design flaws of the Vtiger standard mail converter. The biggest benefit is the un-linked emails wizard that help you capture emails and contacts that did not link.
I hope that helps!
