MK Partners Archive for April, 2008

We started using Google Apps at MK Partners last year and have never looked back at our old ISP’s mail service. We were pleasantly surprised when Salesforce recently announced their Google Apps integration and finally saw a shimmer of hope in our quest to stop using MS Outlook. Thunderbird is great, but without an easy way to add incoming emails to Salesforce, it just isn’t good enough.

So, after the announcement I decided to try tackling this challenge again. I first setup a filter in Gmail to fwd all emails from my test account to my Email-to-Salesforce address. Instant bounce! Apparently, Gmail auto-forwards differently than a normal forward, the from address is tweaked a little for some reason. And since you have to specifically authorize email addresses in Salesforce to be able to use your Email-to-Salesforce address, the email was rejected. No problem, I took the tweaked Gmail address from the bounce message and added it to the list of addresses authorized to use my Email-to-Salesforce address. Success!?!? Sort of, the email was accepted by Salesforce and processed, but not matched to any Lead or Contact because it was trying to match it on my MK Partners address instead of the test address (which I had already created a contact for).

Looking over the instructions more carefully, it appears that my Email-to-Salesforce address has to be bcc’d not fwd’d. Unfortunately, there’s no way to set this up using Gmail filters. Alas, it looks like those of us who want an easy way to add received emails to Salesforce will have to continue using Outlook for the time being.

There’s still some hope though, it is possible to create a custom Email-to-Salesforce service that would be able to properly parse a fwd’d message. Perhaps we’ll see such code in a future post.