Capture incoming Email from ANY Email inbox (Custom Email)

BigContacts offers a powerful tool known as " Custom Email" that allows you to automatically capture incoming emails and store them to the appropriate contact records.  This great feature works with any email account.  Below are the steps that you want to follow to set this up. This requires a one-time setup for each user on your team and after this setup is completed this will work automatically for you in the background.

1)  Locate your "Custom Email" address in BigContacts

Each user on your team will have their own unique "Custom Email" address. Below are the steps you can follow to get your BigContacts Custom Email address.

1. Click on the "Admin" Tab in your system
    
2. Under the "Manage Users" section you will select the "Add/Edit users" link.

   

3. In here you will see a row with your name and a link labeled "Request Custom Email"

    

4. When you click this link, it will create a unique Custom Email address address just for you!

   

2)  Forward a copy of incoming emails to the "Custom Email"

Now that you have located your unique Custom Email address you will want to follow these steps to complete the set up to begin capturing and storing all incoming emails to the appropriate contact records.

1. Log into the account where you had your email inbox.  (This would be your email providers like Gmail or Hotmail, etc.)
2. You'll locate the "settings" link in your email account. Here, you will want to find the section pertaining to "Incoming email".
3. Finally, you will locate the field where you can enter your custom email address so that you would like to forward a COPY of your incoming emails too.

In short, you are locating the settings in your email inbox that allow you to forward a copy of all incoming emails to this Custom Email address. By forwarding a copy of all of these emails to this Custom Email address, our system can then sort and store emails for contacts that we find a match.

It is important to note that for any email that we received were we do not find a match in your system, we will not store that email and clutter up your account. We only store emails in contact records where we find that email address in the FROM field of the email exactly matches what you have in the contact record.

3)  Test your "Custom Email"

You can follow the steps below to ensure that your Custom Email is set up properly and is forwarding emails into your contact records.

1. Click on the "Admin" Tab 
    
2. Under the "Manage Users" section select the "add/edit users" link
    
3. Click directly on the Custom Email address listed to the right of the user's name and color.
    
4. A screen will open that will show up to the last few emails that have been forwarded through your Custom Email. 
    
5. Here you can check to see if any emails are being delivered to that user's Custom Email. At the very end of one of the email string, you will see "saved to".
    
6. If there are names after any of these emails then the custom email system is working. The name after "saved to:" shows you where (if at all) the email was stored (the name of the contact record). 

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 Important Notes:

• The Custom Email feature is designed to keep a copy of an email for historical purposes for the primary contact.   If you have your email provider forwarding a copy of incoming email to your Custom Email, when they send you an email it will still be delivered to your regular email inbox and a COPY will be stored in the Contact's history folder in BigContacts.  The Custom Email will only store an email if it finds a match in the home email or office field of the primary contact, not the spouse or family extensions of the contact.
   
• The Custom Email DOES NOT store emails if they are coming from an email address that matches a user on your system.  This means if you are testing your Custom Email set up you will need to send an email FROM an outside email address (one that does not match your BigContacts username/email address) and TO a contact in your BigContacts system that you know has a matching email address in your BigContacts database. 
   
• Please allow approximately 5 minutes for the email to be sorted and stored within the system.  When the email is stored you should see it in the "Contact History" Folder in the Contact Record. 
   
• Make sure that you have a contact record in your system with an exact matching email address before you test your Custom Email.  If you do not have a contact record with a matching email address, the email will not be stored.