I have email archiving set up so that when I am in outlook I can bcc my custom sugar URL and the email will go into sugar. My issue is the email is going into the "lead" module when i want the emails to go into the opportunity modules. Is there a way to fix this?
Hi Stephen,
Emails are a tricky beast, and it took me a while to wrap my heads around them, and I still have questions...
I divide the relationships between an email bean and other beans into WHO is on the email (Participants) and WHAT is the email about (the relationship between the Email and a Bean)
The WHO (Participants) are the email addresses that are part of the communication (to/from/cc/bcc).
These are implicitly related to "people" records via the email address.
The WHAT is essentially dictated by where you are when you create the email. For example, if you start an email to me from the Opportunities module the email will be related to the Opportunity via a relationship in the emails_beans table. And yes, since my address is on it will ALSO show on the Lead, Contact etc that have that address.
From a table standpoint it looks like this:
What is still "fuzzy" to me is the distinction between emails_beans and the parent_id, parent_type in the email itself (circled in blue) other than cardinality. In both cases I see a variety of modules in each.
When using the email archiving (bcc the sugar address) there is really no good way for Sugar to know WHAT the email is about.
So while you see the email in Sugar under any of the implicit WHO records (Leads, Contacts etc) that share that email address you will not find the WHAT, as that relationship was not created.
You can get around this by choosing to see all the emails related to the Contacts related to the Opportunity by using the settings in your Admin panel but you will see ALL emails related to the Contacts, not just the ones that you are expecting to be related to Opportunity, so for example you will see any of the customer's emails related to Cases and other communications as well, since this setting is using the WHO, as well as the WHAT.
I hope this helps clarify things a little bit.
The distinction becomes important in reporting, when WHO and WHAT get a bit fuzzy and the results of the report are highly dependent on which relationship you consider.
The Emails related to a Lead can be interpreted as either the Lead is the WHO (the Lead's email address is a Participant) or where the Lead is the WHAT (the email is related to the Lead).
Note that I could write an email from the Lead's Emails Subpanel and not include any of the Lead's email addresses at all!
That email would be in the Leads' Emails subpanel because the "WHAT" is the Lead.
FrancescaS
