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The subject of this post may seem a bit harsh, but hopefully by the end of this longish post, you will see where I’m coming from. My call right now, is that there is NO email solution that works with Salesforce that is even remotely usable. I hope that I’m wrong. I really do. If you think I’m wrong please add to the discussion below.

When I’m talking about emails and Salesforce I am talking about the following scenarios. For the tl;dr version I’ve included my ratings for each of the scenarios:

1. Receiving email from an existing client – PASS.
2. Receiving email from a new client – FAIL.
3. Receiving email from a new client about a specific case – Qualified PASS.
4. Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case, replying to the email sent to them – PASS.
5. Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case – FAIL.
6. Emailing to a client – FAIL.
7. Emailing to a client about a specific case – FAIL as above, with a MAJOR FAIL for dealing with attachments.
8. Emailing to a third party about a specific case – FAIL.

In this post, I am not talking about paid email syncing options that are available in the App Exchange (or this post will be very long). You can see that there are many many options, for huge dollar amounts. My thinking is that you pay enough for Salesforce, you should not have to pay more for basic functionality such as tracking emails for your client. There is one paid app that I will comment on, specifically in relation to Email to Cases. 

Receiving Email

Receiving email from an existing client

Emailing in to Salesforce to record that email against an existing contacts is pretty well handled. You can use Email to Salesforce, or the Salesforce for Outlook toolbar (which essentially does exactly the same thing). This matches the email address of the sender with an existing contact in Salesforce and then puts the content of the email in an Activity linked to the Contact record. I give this scenario a PASS.

Receiving email from a new client

I have no idea how you are meant to manage emails that you want to track for new contacts, apart from the obvious:

• Forward the email to Salesforce (or click Add to Salesforce in Outlook)
• Manually create a new Contact
• Manually attach the email to the contact through the Unresolved Email Task or the Unresolved Emails screen.

This takes a number of steps and will probably not be done by most staff after about the first week. This scenario is a definite FAIL – so you probably need to ensure there is another way to create contacts first, rather than when receiving emails for the first time.

Interestingly I noted that forwarding an email and using the Salesforce for Outlook results in different behaviour for Unresolved Emails – forwarded emails are shown in a special Unresolved Emails page, whereas Emails added from Outlook only show up as Tasks. 

Receiving Email related to Cases

Setting up Email to Case

There is a great post over at Button Click Admin that goes over all the steps to Set Up Email-to-Case, and there is a good video from Salesforce showing an overview of using Email-to-Case.

Also, when setting up Email to Case, one must have app is Email2Case Attachment Reassign which takes the attachments from the email and puts them in the Attachments related list on the case.

Receiving email from a new client about a specific case

After Email to Case is set up, the logging of emails into Salesforce to create new Cases works quite well – If the client emails directly to your support email address (or you can forward the email to your support email address). For a client that does not yet exist as a Contact in Salesforce, the case will be created similar to the one shown in the Email to Case Setup Video. and you will have to do the following:

• Manually create a new Contact
• Manually edit the created Case to attach the Contact to the Case.

Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case, replying to the email sent to them.

Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case

Emailing Out of Salesforce

Emailing to a client

If the client is already a Contact record in Salesforce you could just BCC your email to Salesforce address as you send the email out from your email client. But that’s annoying to have to remember that each time. You can achieve a similar thing by clicking the “Send and Add” button in Salesforce for Outlook – a little easier.

The idea, however is to get people out of working from their Inboxes and work from within Salesforce as their primary tool, so you want them to generate the emails from the Contact record in Salesforce. There are a few advantages and disadvantages  with this way.

Advantages:

• Multiple email addresses can be stored against each client record – just choose the right one to send to.
• It looks just like regular email and has all the fields like Additional To and BCC.
• You can do rich text formatting in the body of the email.
• You can choose predefined Email Templates that have Merge fields in them to quickly create emails.
• There is a spell checker built in.
• You can attach files.

Summary

This is a long post and I have tried to be thorough in looking at ALL the options. There are some basic functions of emailing that get a PASS, but as soon as you take it even a little bit past the basics (I don’t think adding an attachment is anything but basic), we descend into the realm of FAIL.

I have yet to see any reasonable, even paid, solution for simply dealing with the attachment issue (without the other features of Loop or Conga). I’m sure it could be coded as a visualforce page, but I really don’t understand why someone hasn’t done it as a simple free app – so maybe I’m missing something that will mean it is difficult to build.

So, if you have any suggestions, other options or favourite apps to deal with emails, please add some detail in the comments below. In a future post, I will talk about the features and issues with one particular email App, Email to Case Premium.

Otherwise, right now, I don’t have a solution.