Also see Outlook integration and Thunderbird integration

You will be using your own email application (eg Gmail, Outlook) for day to day inbox management and emails.

You can get a copy of these emails in Pearl, so that you and other staff can see the whole communication history when you need to make a call or follow up. Using a special inbox called a "dropbox", Pearl will automatically attach incoming and outgoing emails to the relevant contacts in your Pearl account.

Your Pearl account has an email address in the format: dropbox+bn876234dg7@thisispearl.com - which is unique to your company.

Find your dropbox email address at Setup:Options:Contacts

Sending outgoing emails

If you're sending an email to a client or customer from software outside Pearl (eg from Outlook or iPhone), make sure you also copy (CC or BCC) the dropbox email address. Pearl checks the dropbox email account every 5 minutes and does the rest for you.

If you forget to copy to your dropbox

Just forward the email to the dropbox address. Don't add any text, and don't change the subject. Pearl will extract the original sender and recipients as long as you're using standard email software.

You can get some email programmes to automatically copy your dropbox. See Dropbox tips and tricks.

Incoming emails

Ideally you'd set up your email system so that every incoming email is delivered to you as well as being delivered automatically to your dropbox. If you're using GoogleMail, then see below for instructions. If you can't get your incoming emails copied to your dropbox, then you can forward the relevant ones as they arrive.

Pearl will try to clean out any "quoted text" to prevent an email containing content that's already been added to the trail, which also means that if you reply to an email with replies inserted into the "reply" section then these will get removed.

Viewing the emails

Emails appear in the contact's timeline.

Open your Pearl CRM and search for a contact, then click the timeline icon on the right hand side. Pearl will display all emails where any of the contact's three email addresses appears in the recipient list on that email. This means that if a customer has more than one email address, you can still see ALL the emails in the same timeline as their sales, notes, tickets and accounting information.

The clever stuff

OK, so someone has just sent you an email but they're not in your CRM. If you add them shortly after they send the email, you can still see the email in the timeline, even though their email addrses wasn't in Pearl when the email was delivered.

Every email that finds a matching email address in CRM is stored permanently, but we also store up to 100 emails that haven't got a matching email address in case you want to add the contact after the email arrives.