Working on a CRM, need email integrations. Best strategy?

I’m working on a CRM (two actually).

One common feature is to have your emails automatically tracked in the CRM. So I have a contact named Jerry in my CRM. In my gmail I send jerry an email, and I see that interaction logged in Jerry’s profile in the CRM.

I’ve seen a few different ways to accomplish this so far, but wanted to throw it out there to see if I’m missing more clever options.

The ones I see:

  • Integrate with some kind of Oauth for google/yahoo/outloook/apple emails that let’s us use webhooks or do a cron job looking for new emails. This is an okay option, but I think google changed their gmail api recently and you need an expensive security audit?

  • have an email address for the crm like "forwarding@mycrm.com" that users can BCC or forward emails to-- we get the incoming email and create the interaction record. This is not as automated, but may be easier than building oauth connections to all the different email providers out there.

Any other ideas out there?

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Most CRMs force the user to send emails from the CRM’s interface (and not directly from gmail). You can still bcc the user’s gmail account if they really want to see the emails there.

Zendesk creates a “proxy” email address and both sides see only this. It means that when C (customer) sends an email to help@you.com, the app gets the email and sends an email to A (agent) from help@you.com. When A sends a reply to help@you.com, the CRM can log the mail and send a reply from help@you.com (instead of the agent’s email).
The problem with this approach is it’s really hard to handle CCs.

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