Sync Imap account

[GP-S]

Good feature available in hubspot for instance is the ability to synchronize your email account and attach mails or conversation from a customer to an opportunity/company account.

It can be down by adding a kind of inbox for all messages and some auto filters on the sender and recipient field of the mail.

Main idea is to store discussion/attached file directly in the crm without need to copy paste your mail conversation.

P.S: Of course it can be extended to linkedin, whatsapp ...

[FelixMalfait]

Yes we should definitely build that, I agree. I had logged in a similar idea in the discussion section: #211

First step would be to implement a new type of activity (currently we only have notes, then tasks will come this week, a we probably need a third category that describes a past activity I want to log). Then leverage the google sign-in to import email through this as a first step. Then offering a more generic imap solution would be great.

I would say this is on the medium-term roadmap so something that is very likely to be fully implemented before end of year, but not likely to be implemented in the next 5 weeks.

[zetaron]

Even though it might be the step ahead 🙈

I've recently stumbled upon the OpenSpurce https://emailengine.app which promises easy integration of IMAP, Gmail and Outlook by use of WebHooks and REST API.

I didn't yet use it myself but it might be worth a shot.

--

Edit: just saw that it has a proprietary license which requires a paid license... which probably it not a good fit for a core component which might be redistributed with this project...

[GP-S]

Oh cool !I see they even have tracking for opennings and link click.

[GP-S]

For now I am using folk.app and to be honest its main main argument against twenty is how it handle email conversation. Being able to reply directly in your crm and to catch up on all onversation at a glance is a must.

[FelixMalfait]

Yes sorry we still haven't prioritized this. I can commit we'll ship email sync by EOY. Is gmail enough for you? That will be our priority.

[GP-S]

Don't worry Rome wasn't built in a day.
No we don't use gmail and probably never will, sorry.

I am just curious as it is not my field of expertise : Why priorising gmail instead of Imap sync that will open you every mailbox provider (including gmail) ?

[FelixMalfait]

Sorry, you had said it in the title 🤦‍♂️

I'm not 100% sure we'll prioritize gmail first but it's the most likely.
Because:

• gmail is the clear market leader amongst startups, which are the companies most likely to use Twenty
• setting up imap is easy for you but can be complex for less tech-savvy audiences ; hard to beat the simplicity of an OAuth flow

But I agree we shouldn't wait too long to introduce it as an option

[FelixMalfait]

I did a quick investigation on IMAP yesterday. I don't think it's something we want to have to maintain ourselves, it seems full of small details that would be very costly.
Instead the way we should implement this whenever someone decides to take this on is to rely on https://github.com/postalsys/emailengine and considering email engine as a Driver like Microsoft and Google are, which we will interact with through webhooks/API keys - and then email engine will take care of the back-and-fort with imap/smtp.

[zacnoo]

Is there a plan to start implementing such a service? I really like the software otherwise, but it's pretty much a dealbreaker for our company not having IMAP / SMTP support.

Is it in the plans for this year?

[nickwild-999]

LOVE the direction of Twenty, but yes I agree this is pretty much a deal breaker not to have access to office365 emails.

[justinan7]

Agreed, once you have O365 email integration my company will be in.

[BernhardBaumrock]

@FelixMalfait any update on this? I discovered Twenty yesterday and it looks extremely promising. I'm the dev of a startup and our sales guy wants to use hubspot because he can efficiently send out mails to contacts from predefined templates/drafts.

I love open source and I love what I see so far from Twenty, but our mails are also self-hosted and thus we'd need IMAP support.

Do you have a roadmap for supporting IMAP and sending out mails? I read in the docs it's "coming soon".

Congrats on what you have built so far! Really outstanding software.

[FelixMalfait]

Hey @BernhardBaumrock IMAP support is now in beta on the main branch (need to go to Settings > Lab to enable it). Next time we do a docker version it will be in it! We also support Office 365 now with a native integration like Google.
There's an ongoing pull request for SMTP which will be merged very soon but the use-cases for outgoing emails are still relatively limited: it's only available as a node for workflow automation, there is no reply/compose button to reply to emails from the app directly at this point.

[MarcelBigger]

As e-mail is the most important business communication channel, a CRM application not showing in- and outbound e-mail messages for all clients and contacts, regardless of which e-mail server/service is used, is IMHO seriously if not fatally deficient.

Implementing native integrations for all major e-mail platforms/protocols ought to be your highest priority.

[FelixMalfait]

IMAP/SMTP/Caldav is finally complete thanks to @neo773 (it will first be available via a toggle in Settings > Lab). This will be in the upcoming docker release (end of next week), or is already available on main for local development. Feedback welcome!

[moan0s]

I started using it and have experienced mixed results.
Ot's not clear to me how e-mails actually get imported. My expectation would be

• Add an e-mail address ✅
• E-Mails are fetched from the server ✅ I see this in the logs)
• For each e-mail message, a person is created ⚠️ Yes this depends on the settings, but for "Sent and received" I'd expect all messages to create a person. This does only work for sent e-mails right now
• New e-mails are added to existing or new people ❌ Doesn't work at all

Maybe some things are not yet implemented?

Probably this is all the same as #13397 and I just have to stay patient 😁

[FelixMalfait]

Thanks a lot for the beta feedback! @neo773 is looking into it and it should be fixed in the next release

[moan0s]

Sure, happy to. I'm looking forward to testing it again!

[neo773]

@moan0s
I have opened a new PR to address these issues
Though Contact auto-creation policy should work as expected it's outside of IMAP's scope and is handled by MessagingSaveMessagesAndEnqueueContactCreationService