Email is one of the main methods of communication with your customers and prospects, and so it's important to sync your emails into the Planhat platform, where they can be viewed by the whole team, and seen in the context of other types of data.

Let's say you've already connected up your work email account (Gmail or Outlook) to Planhat, and specified the folders to sync. But does this mean literally all the emails in those folders will be synced to Planhat? What if there are emails you don't want to be synced?

The first thing to note is that in Planhat, only emails to/from your customers or prospects are included in the sync, because emails (a type of Conversation record) are always associated with a Company in Planhat. Emails are mapped to Companies by looking at End User email addresses, and domains specified in Planhat for each Company. So no need to worry about your father emailing you family photos, or your stamp collectors' newsletter - none of those personal emails will get synced into Planhat, so you're not cluttering the view of your colleagues, or accidentally sharing private information.

But sometimes, this email address / domain matching alone is not enough. There still could be some emails that are "noise" (irrelevant), and still some sensitive (private) content, even if those emails are associated with a Company in your Planhat tenant. That's where enhanced filtering options in the "Settings" Global Tool come in. There is a lot of flexibility here, so you can define exactly how you would like to filter emails.

In this article, we'll explain the variety of email sync settings that you can use to specify which emails are synced into Planhat.

Email sync filtering is a series of settings that you use to prevent specific emails from being synced into Planhat. Where you configure these settings is also where you can choose whether related email domains are automatically added to Companies in Planhat. You can even use email-specific rules retroactively, to clear up existing emails in your Planhat tenant (e.g. remove unimportant out-of-office replies).

Email sync filtering is applied to your organization's Planhat tenant as a whole. It can be configured by you as a Planhat admin, as long as your Role has the "Admin Access" workflow permission and you therefore have access to the "Email Sync" part of the "Settings" Global Tool (shown below).

Click the image to view it enlarged

As you can see in the screenshot above, this email filtering has three categories:

There are two main advantages to email sync filtering:

With the range of different rule types available in Planhat, these settings can be general and wide-reaching, or really specific. You can use the customization options to tailor the behavior to best suit your organization.

Now you understand the principles, let's deep-dive into the practical details of how you set this up.

We'll start by explaining how to navigate to these settings within your Planhat tenant, and then we'll go through each of the individual settings.

To configure email sync filtering, begin by navigating to the "Settings" Global Tool, which you can get to by clicking on your tenant name in the top-left corner of Planhat, and selecting "Settings".

Once in Settings, scroll to the "Email Sync" category, and select "Filtering".

The general rules block out domains or email addresses.

The first box you'll see is "Internal Domain":

Another setting related to domains is the toggle switch "Don't add related domains Automatically":

You'll see another box for "Internal Emails":

The next section of settings applies to emails with specific combinations of Planhat Users (i.e. you and your team members) and End Users (your customers and prospects).

For example, although you would want almost all emails related to your customers/prospects to get synced into Planhat, correspondence between your CEO and the CEO of a customer/prospect might contain commercially sensitive information that you don't want everyone to see. Or maybe a Company is both your customer and your accountant, and when your Finance team asks them a question, you don't want those emails synced into Planhat, as they could contain sensitive payroll information. Or perhaps one of your Users has a friend or relative who's an End User, and they don't work together but do use their work emails for personal messages, and you'd like to block the sync of that.

With "Emails stop list", you can configure specific combinations of a Planhat User and one or more End Users (specified by email address). If an email includes that User and at least one of the End Users, that email will not be synced into Planhat (regardless of whether there are any other Users or End Users included in the email).

"Emails white list" is a similar method of filtering, but works the other way around. If a User is added to the white list, then the only emails of theirs that will be synced into Planhat are those with the specified End Users (email addresses).

Note that Users should only be added to a stop list or a white list, not both.

Sometimes, you might want to exclude particular emails from the sync based on criteria other than participant email addresses - such as a particular word or phrase in the subject or body of the email.

In the "Email-Specific Rules" section, you build rules to filter what syncs into Planhat. If an email matches a filter/rule, it will be excluded from the sync. You can even use these rules retroactively to "clean up" (remove) previously synced emails!

When you click to add an email-specific rule, you can either create a new custom filter (see this separate article for more on designing filters) ...

... or you can choose from a variety of example template filters, which you can either use without further configuring, or edit.

The templates (titles/names shown above) illustrate some typical use cases for email-specific rules, such as excluding meeting invites, out-of-office replies, and emails from "no reply" email addresses. These are emails that can be considered clutter in your Planhat tenant, as they aren't particularly useful or actionable.

While you're designing a filter (whether from scratch or from a template), it can be helpful to click "Show matched emails" - this runs your filter/rule on the emails currently synced to your Planhat tenant. You can use this to double check that the rule is configured as desired, and it also gives you an indication of how many emails it's likely to affect. (Note that this is optional: you will still see matched emails when you click "Save", as we discuss below.)

When you are finished, click "Save". Before saving, Planhat will run the "Show matched emails" check, and present the results like in the second screenshot below.

As you can see in the orange buttons in the screenshot above, you then have the option to apply the filter/rule to just new emails that could be synced in future, or also to first remove existing emails that match the filter/rule. This can be a good way to "tidy up" the existing emails in your tenant, rather than only making changes to the sync going forward.