Email Importing Overview

When does Email Importing Happen?

Requirements for Email Importing

1. Email Importing must be enabled.
2. Each user must have Email Importing enabled with proper credentials.
3. A match must be made between the email and the record in SAM.

How Email Importing Matches

SAM searches your email server for the following criteria to match the records you have entered in SAM. 

1. Email Address - An email address entered in SAM on a Main Entity that corresponds to an email address in the TO, CC, and SENT fields of an email.  The email address must be recorded through an email address field type. The BCC field is only searchable for emails you sent and only for certain email providers.
2. Entity ID - The end of the subject line of an email contains an entity's ID. See Inter-Agency Emails below for more details.
3. Entity Last Name - The end of the subject line of an email which contains a record's unique Last Name. The entity must also be active, ‘Active Entity’ = Yes to import via name. Example: Subject Line Text Family Zasyatkin. A common last name such as Smith will not match through this method.

This search depends upon how you setup the Entity Specific Email Importing Options during Setup/Enable Email Importing. 

 

Inter-Agency Email Communications

Inter-Agency emails are not imported by default, as long as the user's have an organizational email address or have their email address excluded.

To have inter-agency emails imported which are regarding a specific family, child, child location, birth parent, person or organization:

• Enter their "Entity Type ID #" in the subject line of the email.
• For example, "This is an example of a subject line for an email about Child ID 555". 
• After you send this email to another employee in your organization, it will be stored under the Child ID 555's communication record. 

Copy and paste the whole field title and ID, like "Family ID 10", into the subject line, to ensure you have entered it in the correct format. By Default, each entity's ID can be found on their Cover Page towards the top left side of the form. It's not possible to add multiple Entity IDs to the end of the subject line. 

You must use the official "entity type"/"table name", such as "Family" or "Birth Mother" in the subject line before the ID.  Note: Changing the field title of the Entity ID field will nullify this tip.

If you sent or received an inter-agency email without the entity's ID in the subject line and you would like to have the email imported, you can add the entity's ID in the subject line in a reply to the person or you can add the entity's ID in the subject line and forward the email to yourself.

 

Manually Initiate

The only reason to manually initiate email importing is to have your emails imported immediately instead of waiting until the next scheduled run time. View Email Importing - Manual Initiation for more information on how to do this.  

 

Special Notes

• The first run of Email Importing may take several hours. 
• Email Importing can take several hours for the emails to be imported by the ID in the subject line, due to the speed limitations of text searching through so many emails.
• Email Importing does NOT import Attachments. Space would be consumed rapidly as well as a decrease in system performance. SAM does not have logic for handling imported document attachments for being stored in the Document Section. Please refer to the original email for document attachments. 

 

Viewing Imported Email Details

You can see the Details of the Imported Email, such as the From and To email address by clicking Advanced Options > Imported Email Details from the Communication Details form. If you don't see this option then it means the email was not imported.

 

Technical Details for IT

Email Importing uses IMAP commands. Most email servers have IMAP enabled by default, but if you are managing your own email server then you may need to enable it. It indexes all the emails for each user, except the emails in Excluded Folders.  It only pulls down the email addresses and subject line; the body is not retrieved unless the email is going to be imported into the Communications. Attachments are not retrieved. Each time email importing runs, it checks for new messages using an IMAP Message ID, so a message is never indexed more than once.