In our current CRM software Highrise there are email dropboxes (Documentation including video demo). The concept is simple, yet very powerful. For every user there is a unique import email address called “dropbox”. You can drop emails there that will be automatically appear in the activity streams for contacts, companies, deals and other entities.
Advantages
Such a dropbox has a lot of advantages:
While working on your mails you can document communication easily by putting your dropbox mail address to BCC or simply forward a mail to this dropbox.
This also works easily on a mobile phone.
It is a transparent solution that works without logging in to ERPNext
Forward emails to a deal dropbox (Equivalent to Opportunity in ERPNext)
Every deal has a unique dropbox address, visible at the top of the deal. You can add emails from your inbox by forwarding or BCC’ing a deal dropbox address.
Highrise will receive the email and automatically attach it to the correct deal in your account. In the example below, we BCC a deal dropbox address and the email appears on the deal page.
From the docs and what @max_morais_dmm said I take that the user can access his inbox in ERPNext, which tries to recognize the content of an email and offers to create an opportunity (or something else) from it.
You cannot send emails from a foreign inbox and have them appear as comment on an opportunity, but you can, for example, create a new opportunity from an email within ERPNext.
Let’s assume you have an opportunity and a quote already. Now the customer tells you, that he needs another week to decide. In Highrise I would simply forward this mail to the opportunity dropbox. #easyasapie
In ERPNext I understand that I would have to manually copy the content into the comment box. That’s lame.
Well for our CRM setup ERPNext usually does what you require ie that updates to a Opportunity or Quote can appear in their stream when an email is sent to the generic ERP email address.
This happens when an email is sent from the Contact and the email is shown on the Opportunity or Quote as an email. Thus the Opportunity or Quote in the list view is last modified recently and so rises to the top of the list.
The nice thing in terms of the functionality is that obviously it would be quite easy to miss this update. But these updates are also shown in your Email Inbox and are linked so you can click right through to the relevant Opportunity or Quote etc
After using this system in our company for nearly nine months now there’s quite a bit of really well thought out functionality here. @rmehta obviously keeps a keen eye on the usability of each feature.
There’s also other nuances of behaviour that are great but a bit hidden. For example you can easily move by relinking an email to a different doc type if it’s been auto allocated wrongly.
The email inbox is quite good but would benefit from some ‘spit and polish’ ie when deleting an email from inbox view it does not refresh automatically or when on email itself should go back to list view like a full email client.
The documentation doesn’t really do it justice - it does work quite well . We are certainly happy with it.
Sometimes the emails coming in from customers do get linked to the wrong doctype but this can happen with any CRM system really if the emails haven’t been replies to an earlier email sent from ERPNext.
One other hint - if using Thunderbird use the mail redirect add-on to redirect mails to the std ERP email address rather than forwarding and then the email from address is mapped to a contact / customer automatically
% fine, to automatically link the answer with the source do