CRM Academy

ContaxCRM has the ability to monitor your email as it arrives into Apple Mail, or on Windows, Outlook, and then if that email is from anyone who exists in your ContaxCRM database, the email will be copied into ContaxCRM, date and time stamped and stored against that contacts notes. Automagically :-)

This is an incredibly useful function which will be rolled out to other email clients in the future.

Your email can now be tied directly into your single user or corporate database without any copying and pasting.

This is the procedure for setting up this functionality for Apple Mail.

To make this happen is a two stage process. First we have to create a new Rule in Mail, and then we have to 'tick a box' in ContaxCRM to tell ContaxCRM that we wish to have our email automatically processed.

Maintaining my ideals about keeping it as simple as possible and not burrowing too deeply into your computer, this solution makes no changes to your OSX System or Mail application, other than a new email Rule. The process is accomplished through the magic of AppleScript running behind the scenes to give you a slick, simple and high performance solution.

1. Create a new Email Rule

Open Apple Mail and go to the Mail menu. Choose Preferences. Select the Rules toolbar button.

Click the Add Rule button.

I'll describe how to set this up:

Description: This is not critical but it makes sense to call it 'Incoming ContaxCRM Integration'

The next section is where you tell Mail under what conditions (criteria) should it copy email to ContaxCRM. In the example image above you can see I have said that if an email Contains in the To section the text artenscience.co.uk. I have done this so that email that arrives to one of my personal accounts does not get processed further, only email to my business account artenscience.co.uk is checked.

The final section is where Mail is told what to do with the email that matched the conditions we specified in the previous section. The action should be Run Applescript and you should then use the Choose button to navigate to your ContaxCRM folder and select the application CCRM_INC_MAIL.app. Thats it. Click OK, close the Preferences and you can quit Mail.

2. Edit the ContaxCRM Preferences

Launch ContaxCRM and select the Preferences from either the Toolbar or from the ContaxCRM Menu. Click the Configuration tab:

Check the Accept Incoming Mail control. Click Save. Quit ContaxCRM. You have now completed both steps necessary to enable ContaxCRM Email Processing.

How it Works

As email is received by Apple Mail it is checked against the new rule that you have setup. If the email matches the rule then the email contents are output ready for later processing by ContaxCRM. ContaxCRM checks this output at intervals of 5 minutes. This output is scanned from beginning to end and any emails that are from contacts that exist in your ContaxCRM database are inserted into the ContaxCRM database as historical notes linked to the correct contact.

Any emails from people who do not exist in the ContaxCRM database are ignored. When the processing has finished the output file is deleted and will be automatically created again when further email are received.

In addition you can manually check for email to process from the Actions menu of ContaxCRM, the option is Process Incoming Email.