Summary
You (as a Planhat admin) can initiate the email sync of the "Inbox" and/or "Sent" labels/folders for all Users in your Planhat tenant
You can also stop the sync of these emails for all Users too
Other labels/folders are not affected
The centralized sync preferences apply to current and future Users
Who is this article for?
Planhat admins who manage email connections for their organization
Article contents
Introduction
This feature is currently in Early Access, so it is available in some Planhat tenants before General Availability.
Communication with your customers and prospects - whether it's emails, tickets, calls or chats - is an important category of data. For example, you'll want all relevant emails to be synced into Planhat, so you can have a full 360-degree view of your customers/prospects. AI analysis of emails (e.g. as described here) gives you valuable insight.
Each User can have their email account connected to Planhat. There are two main ways that email accounts can be connected - each individual person can connect their email via their User Profile, or you (as a Planhat admin) can connect the email accounts of all Users via "Centralized Connect".
Once email accounts are connected (you have gone through the authentication etc.), the next step is for the chosen emails to be synced. For each User, specific folders/labels are selected in order to sync those emails - so you can choose to sync certain types of emails but not others. Individual Users can make this selection via their own User Profiles; but it's also possible for you (as a Planhat admin) to centrally define default labels/folders to sync, and enable or disable syncing of emails for all Users in one go. This latter option (admins choosing sync preferences) is the focus of this article - we'll talk you through how it works, and the expected results in various scenarios.
📌 Definition
Throughout this article we are capitalizing the word "User", as User is the Planhat data model (equivalent to "object" from some other tools) corresponding to users of Planhat within your Planhat tenant (your organization's copy of Planhat) - Users are you and your colleagues, also sometimes called "Team Members" in Planhat.
📚 Further reading
This process of applying default email syncing often follows on from connecting email accounts via Centralized Connect. You can read all about Centralized Connect in our separate article here.
🚀 Tip
Selecting which labels/folders to sync isn't the only way you can define which emails are synced into Planhat. You can learn about additional tenant email sync filter settings here.
How to set default synced labels/folders
📌 Important to note
Your Planhat Role needs to have the "Admin Access" workflow permission to be able to see the relevant part of the "Settings" Global Tool to configure this
You can set default sync folders regardless of whether your tenant is set for Users to connect their Gmail or Outlook individually, or set to Centralized Connect so an admin connects everyone's Gmail or Outlook
For you (as a Planhat admin) to configure default email syncing, you should:
Go to the "Settings" Global Tool (in the "System Admin" menu)
Go down to the "Email Sync" category
Click on the "Email setup" tab
You will see the "Default Synced Labels" settings like so:
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Simply select (or deselect) your choice of labels/folders via the checkboxes, and then click "Apply to all users" to push out that change
Note that the labels/folders to choose from will be those that all Users have - "Inbox" and "Sent" - so you won't see individuals' custom labels/folders here
After you have clicked the button to set the default folders, as well as this applying to all applicable current Users, this will also apply to any Users whose email accounts get connected in future (e.g. new Users)
Next in this article, we'll go over how this works in further detail, considering various scenarios.
Enabling an automatic email sync
Firstly, we'll go through the most typical scenario: turning on the automatic email sync for everyone.
If we take the example where you want to sync both the "Inbox" and "Sent" labels/folders, you simply select those two checkboxes, and click on the button "Apply to all users".
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After you have done this, Planhat schedules a job in the background, which goes through all the Users, and looks at the applicable labels/folders (e.g. "Inbox") and skips any labels/folders that are not applicable (e.g. "Newsletters").
Once this process is complete, when each User goes to their own User Profile ...
... and specifically the "Email" tab (shown in the example screenshot below), they should see the relevant labels/folder selected as per the defaults specified, with a note that the sync is enabled for those labels/folders. (It may be necessary for them to refresh their screen to see the updated view.)
Click the image to view it enlarged
📌 Important to note
Each User needs the "Email sync" workflow permission enabled for their Role in order to see the "Email" tab in their User Profile.
This will also apply to any Users whose email accounts are connected to Planhat at a later date (e.g. new Users to your Planhat tenant), whether that's Users whose email accounts are connected automatically via Centralized Connect, or Users who manually/individually connect their email account via their User Profile. (Note that a background job runs to select your chosen sync folders once the email is connected; individual Users should wait a short while and then refresh the screen on their User Profile to see the selected folders take effect.)
Disabling an automatic email sync
What about the opposite scenario?
In the Settings, if you click "Apply to all users" when the "Inbox" and "Sent" boxes are deselected ...
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... the effect will be that each User will have those labels/folders deselected in their User Profile too ...
Click the image to view it enlarged
... and therefore those emails won't be synced any more.
This means, for example, that if an individual User has selected "Inbox" in their User Profile, and then an admin working in Settings clicks "Apply to all users" when the checkboxes are not selected there (even if they were never selected there), that will deselect "Inbox" for all Users, including the person who had already selected it for themselves. To summarize, updates pushed out from the Settings will override what individual Users have configured.
If a User already has other labels/folders selected
Let's look at a scenario where a User has already selected different labels/folders via their User Profile - e.g. "Project X" - and so those emails are syncing. What happens then, if an admin in their tenant either selects or deselects "Inbox" and/or "Sent" in the Settings and then clicks "Apply to all users"?
The answer is that those other folders will not be affected (either enabled/or disabled) - only the "Inbox" and/or "Sent" folders will be affected, to match the checkboxes in the Settings.
If new User email accounts are connected after a default selection/deselection has been pushed out
When you click "Apply to all users", whether you are pushing the selection (and therefore syncing) or deselection (and therefore stopping syncing) of labels/folders, it applies to all applicable, connected Users at that point in time - and also to Users whose email accounts are connected in future, whether that's connected via Centralized Connect or manually/individually via their User Profiles. When a User email account is newly connected, this will initiate a background job to select and sync the folders you specified. This job may take a little while (e.g. a few minutes), depending on the workload of the tenant's infrastructure. After a short wait, newly connected Users may need to refresh their User Profile in their browser to see the synced folder selection.