Most tools say they "sync email". Here's what that can mean, what matters, and how to compare properly.
Built for small teams who live in email.
When a CRM says it "integrates with Gmail" or "syncs with Outlook," that could mean anything from "you can BCC an address to log an email" to "your inbox becomes a full-featured team workspace with threading, permissions, and AI-powered follow-ups."
The problem: vendors use the same language to describe wildly different capabilities. This makes it nearly impossible to compare tools or know what you're actually getting.
This page breaks down what "email integration" really includes, so you can evaluate tools based on capabilities—not marketing fluff.
You copy/paste notes or BCC an address to log emails to the CRM.
Suits: Solo users with low email volume.
A Gmail or Outlook sidebar shows contact info and lets you log activity with one click.
Suits: Small teams who want quick context without leaving their inbox.
Some data syncs both ways (contacts, basic activity), but not everything. Threading and advanced features may be limited.
Suits: Teams that need light automation without full workflow integration.
The tool understands threads, ownership, and follow-ups around email. Email becomes the hub for customer work.
Suits: Teams living in email who need structure and shared visibility without heavy admin.
Deep permissions, compliance features, audit logs, reporting, and multi-team workflows with advanced automation.
Suits: Larger organizations with complex compliance, security, and reporting needs.
Use this matrix to evaluate any CRM's email integration. Toggle between Gmail and Outlook to see provider-specific guidance, and filter to essentials if you want just the must-haves.
Emails automatically appear against the right contact without manual steps. The system captures both sent and received messages and attaches them to contact records.
If logging is manual, it won't happen consistently, and you'll lose visibility into customer conversations.
Email replies and forwards are grouped together as a single conversation thread, maintaining the full context of back-and-forth discussions.
Without threading, you'll see disconnected messages and lose the conversation flow, making it hard to understand context.
Files attached to emails are captured, stored, and accessible within the CRM alongside the email conversation.
Attachments often contain critical information like proposals, contracts, or specifications that need to be easily retrievable.
Team members can add private notes or context to email threads that are visible to the team but not to the customer.
Internal notes let you capture important context, next steps, or handoff information without cluttering the actual email thread.
Defines whether contact data flows only from email to CRM (one-way) or syncs bidirectionally, keeping both systems updated.
Two-way sync can create conflicts and duplicates if not managed properly. One-way is safer but less flexible.
The system's logic for detecting and merging duplicate contacts that might be created from different email addresses or name variations.
Without proper duplicate handling, you'll end up with multiple records for the same person, fragmenting your data.
How often the system syncs email data to the CRM, and whether you can see when the last sync occurred or if there are delays.
Delayed syncs mean your team might be working with outdated information. Knowing sync status prevents confusion.
The system respects unsubscribe requests and prevents team members from contacting people who have opted out.
Critical for compliance and avoiding spam complaints. Also prevents awkward situations where someone emails an unsubscribed contact.
Conversations and contacts can be assigned to specific team members, with clear ownership that determines who's responsible for follow-up.
Without clear ownership, important conversations can fall through the cracks because no one knows whose job it is to respond.
The system alerts you if a teammate is already composing a reply to the same email, preventing duplicate or conflicting responses.
Prevents embarrassing situations where two team members send different answers to the same customer question.
Organized views that let you see conversations that need attention, sorted by priority, owner, or status (like a support ticket queue).
Queues help teams triage work efficiently and ensure nothing gets missed in a busy inbox.
You can set a reminder on a specific email conversation, and the system will alert you when it's time to follow up.
Without reminders tied to specific threads, important follow-ups get forgotten when inboxes get busy.
Temporarily hide an email from your inbox and have it reappear at a specified time, like Gmail's native snooze feature.
Snoozing helps you focus on what matters now while ensuring less-urgent items come back when they're relevant.
Convert an email into a trackable task or to-do item with a due date, preserving a link back to the original conversation.
Emails often contain action items that need to be tracked separately from the conversation thread.
Automated logic that flags conversations requiring action based on rules (like 'no reply in 3 days' or 'waiting on customer').
Rules help you spot conversations that need attention without manually reviewing every thread.
Search functionality that looks across email content, contact names, company names, deal titles, and custom fields all at once.
When you need to find a conversation or contact quickly, slow or limited search becomes a major bottleneck.
Email conversations can be linked to specific deals or sales opportunities, so you see all related communication in one place.
Without deal association, you have to manually piece together which emails relate to which opportunities.
The system logs not just emails but also phone calls, calendar meetings, and other interactions with contacts.
Email is only part of the story. Seeing calls and meetings alongside emails gives you complete context.
Granular controls over which team members can view, edit, or delete specific contacts, deals, or email conversations.
Without proper permissions, sensitive customer data might be visible to people who shouldn't see it.
Clear documentation about where and how email content is stored (cloud servers, which region, encryption at rest).
You need to know where customer data lives for compliance, privacy, and security reasons.
A record of who accessed, modified, or deleted data, including email conversations and contact records.
Audit logs are critical for security investigations, compliance, and understanding how data was changed.
Support for single sign-on (SSO) via corporate identity providers and admin-level controls for user management.
Larger organizations need centralized authentication and the ability to enforce security policies across the team.
The mobile app or mobile web interface includes most of the core features available on desktop, not just a limited subset.
If key features don't work on mobile, you'll lose productivity whenever you're away from your desk.
If the only way to log emails is by BCCing a special address, that's not really integration—it's manual work disguised as automation.
Some tools don't preserve email threading properly, so you see disconnected messages instead of coherent conversations.
Poorly implemented two-way sync can create duplicate contacts every time data changes, leading to a messy database.
If you use Gmail or Outlook shared mailboxes, test carefully—many integrations handle them as an afterthought.
Some tools default to sharing all email with the entire team. Make sure you can control who sees what.
If the mobile experience is just a web wrapper with missing features, you'll lose productivity on the go.
If emails take 10+ minutes to appear in the CRM and there's no status indicator, your team will work with stale data.
Don't just read the feature list. Actually test the integration during your trial. Here's a quick checklist:
Go through the OAuth flow and grant necessary permissions.
Send a few back-and-forth emails to simulate a real conversation.
Verify emails appear on the right contact, threads stay together, and attachments are preserved.
Test whether reminders are easy to set and actually fire.
Invite a teammate and check if they can see the conversation and add notes.
Send from a different email address and see if it creates a duplicate contact.
Search for a word in an email body and a contact field. Is it fast and accurate?
Open the mobile app or mobile web and try logging, viewing, and searching.
Ralivi is built for small teams who live in email. We handle threading, follow-ups, and team visibility—so you can stop doing data entry and start closing deals.