Email

You can send an email message from any record in an Object. Additionally, you can communicate with members of your Team and Users outside of your team.

Sending Messages from the Platform

When viewing any record in the platform, an email message can be sent out in regards to that record.

Email History

When you use the platform to send an email message, a copy of the message is tracked in the record history.

Email Templates

You can enhance your communications with Template Variables to personalize your messages.

Instead of a generic "Dear Sir" salutation, your message can begin: "Hello Carl, it's been 2 weeks since spoke about Project X ..."

Send Email from a Record

To send an email message from a record:

1. Open the tab that contains the record of interest
2. Click the record to open it
3. In the area that says, "Email or Add a note", begin typing your message.
   • The area expands to display an editor window and additional buttons.
   • The default is Private Note, which records your comments in the record history.
4. Click Email to send your comments as a message, as well
   • For anything other than the Cases object, a Subject field appears above the message area.
     (For Cases, the subject field is pre-defined.)
5. Optionally, choose an Email Template
   • The subject field is then pre-filled from the Template.
   • If text already exists in the subject field, text from the template is appended to it
6. When finished, click [Submit].
   A message appears confirming that the email has been sent, and the message is recorded in the record history.

Note: Users can also send a message from a Report. Learn more: Reports#Email a Report.

Email Bounce Notification

When you send an email message to an address that is no longer active, or if the email server is very busy, you may get an error message (a bounce message).

How it Works

When you send an email message from the platform and it bounces, you are notified by email, so that you can then take action to correct the email address for that Contact, or try again later.

Troubleshooting: I'm not getting any Email Bounce Notification Messages

If you were expecting a bounce message and didn't get it, check your Spam folder. Your email service provider may have identified the email bounce notification as spam, and your email client may be setup to automatically move spam to a separate folder.

To avoid this problem, add a line to your Email Templates, requesting that the recipients add your email address to their contacts list, like this:

In order to ensure delivery of our emails to your inbox, please remember to add 
our email address to your email address book.

Plan Your Document

When planning to communication, whether via a small paragraph-length letter or multi-volume reference tool, consider three issues:

• Purpose — What is the intended use for the document?
• Audience — Who is the document for?
• Scope — How much detail should be included in the document?

Once you have answered these basic questions, you next need to determine what information you plan to draw from the object. Remember that the information you want to include does not need to currently exist in the object. You can choose to modify the object itself to support your letter.

You can also build in logic to the template that can alter the text and other information based on information provided by the object.

Learn more: Template Variables.

SMS Messaging

SMS is the protocol for sending text messages to mobile devices. Read about it at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS.

This article covers information about how you can use SMS text messaging to send information out. It can be used with any email function within the platform.

Using SMS

Want to be alerted on your mobile phone whenever you have new data or updates within the platform? It's easy to send an SMS message to mobile phones for you or your team.

1. For the To: field select Specific Email Addresses.
2. In the select Specific Email Addresses field, type in the SMS-email address. (see table below)
3. Type the message you want to send to the phone. You can also embed template variables related to that record. For example: $account.name.

Below are the most popular carriers and their formats and their character limits for messages. Just replace 5551234567 with your own number.

Carrier	Email Format	Limit
AT&T	5551234567@txt.att.net	160
Verizon Wireless	5551234567@vtext.com	140
T-Mobile USA	5551234567@tmomail.net	160
Metro PCS	5551234567@mymetropcs.com	120
Sprint PCS	5551234567@messaging.sprintpcs.com	160
Alltell	5551234567@message.alltel.com	116

For a complete list of carriers and their formats you can go to: http://www.livejournal.com/tools/textmessage.bml?mode=details