Automatic historical email import

We're excited to announce an upcoming change to how email syncing works with Close. We're calling it "automatic historical email import".

One of the best features of Close has always been its 2-way email sync – allowing email you and your team sent outside of Close to automatically show up on relevent leads and contacts in Close. This has allowed your sales team to get the context of all communication with this lead.

Until now, however, it was a bit tricky to know which emails would show up on a lead. It depended on when each person on your team linked their email account with Close and when the lead was created. If you created a new lead in Close (or imported leads from CSV), we wouldn't show you any of the valuable email history with those leads unless you manually forwarded each of the past emails to Close. The same problem would occur if someone on your team forgot to connect their email account in Close until later.

Based on much feedback and our desire to eliminate manual data entry from your sales process, we are simplifying how emails get attached to your leads in Close. Going forward, by default, Close will automatically import all historical email related to your leads.

Whenever you or someone on your team creates a lead or adds a new email address to a lead, Close will automatically import and attach any historical emails from your team's email accounts. Past emails sent to/from any of your existing leads will also be attached to your leads.

We'll slowly start rolling out this feature December 11, and it may take 1-2 weeks until the roll out is complete to everyone.

We decided to make this improvement to make it easy for you to see historical interaction with a lead and avoid having you to specifically forward emails from your already connected email account. It's also helpful when you bulk import leads, so that quickly after importing them you'll be able to see all emails that you or your team sent with these leads.

While this change has been heavily requested and we believe will make most of our customer's lives better, we recognize there are some potential privacy issues if you send sensitive emails to people outside of your organization that you don't want your coworkers to see. You have a few options:

1. Do nothing and take advantage of this new feature. Older emails found in you and your teams email accounts (if they are connected to Close) will auto-attach to relevant leads in Close.
2. Disconnect your IMAP email account if you don't want any of your outside emails to automatically show up in Close for your team to see. To do this, simply head to Settings -> Email Settings and click Edit IMAP and then click the trash can icon. If you do this, you'll still be able to manually forward individual emails to Close.
3. Custom settings. If you want to keep your email account syncing via IMAP, but are concerned about the new "automatic historical email import" then please email us with details of your concerns and we can explore other options specific to your account.

We are happy to hear your feedback if you have any questions or concerns.