An automated email syncing and logging solution, like Match My Email, needs to understand and work with all the complexities inherent in Opportunities.

Match My Email only matches emails to Open Opportunities under the assumption that Closed Opportunities are complete and less likely to be relevant. Emails between a sales rep and a Closed Opportunity are still captured by the system, in that they continue to be matched to the associated Contact and Account records.

Match My Email syncs emails to Opportunities based on Contact Roles. Match My Email compares the email addresses in an email header to the email address fields in Salesforce.com associated with Contact Roles. Email addresses are very good unique identifiers. Computers are good at sorting and matching them.

When an Opportunity is created from inside a Contact, the new open Opportunity automatically sets the Contact as the Primary Contact inside Contact Roles. Match My Email will only sync and upload emails containing that Primary Contact’s email address to this type of Opportunity.

Note in the screenshot (all images can be clicked for more detail) above that the Primary radio button is checked next to Dan Stablemaster’s Contact name and that Dan has not been assigned a Role.

The screenshot above shows how the Contact Role appears in a default Salesforce.com Opportunity Page Layout. Dan is visible in the Contact Roles Viewer with the Primary box checked, but note that he has not been assigned a Role.

What we have seen so far is clear and simple, but Salesforce.com always makes things more flexible, complicated and confusing, and more powerful if you master the logic. Looking at the first screenshot above, you will notice that all the Contacts associated with the Account associated with the Opportunity have automatically been populated in the Contact Role list – note that Sarah Bright and John Stablehand are automatically listed because they are associated with the underlying Account called Bedford Horse Farm. If you select a Role for one of the names on the default list (seen here in blue next to Sarah Bright).

then that Contact will also appear on the Opportunity page in Contact Roles with its Role displayed. Match My Email will sync the emails to any Contact given a Role in an Opportunity.

But if you create an Opportunity during a conversion of a Lead to a Contact/Account/Opportunity, Salesforce.com behaves differently. It does not assign the Lead as the Primary Contact in the Opportunity. Instead, it just adds the Lead to the New Contact Role list as a default and leaves its Role undefined. Match My Email will match to this undefined, default Contact Role, even though it does not appear on the Opportunity Contact Role Viewer. If the User subsequently defines the Contact as the Primary Contact or gives it a Role, then Match My Email will continue to sync emails to it inside an Opportunity.

When a new Contact is added to an Account, the Open Opportunity will automatically include that new Contact in its Contact Role list. Match My Email will sync emails to the new Contact in the Opportunity inherited from the Account as a default from then on. However, if the User goes into the New Contact Role list and defines other Contacts as either a Primary Contact or gives it or them a Role, Match My Email will only match to the Contact marked as Primary or with a defined Role.

Finally, if you create a new Opportunity from inside an Account, then all the Contacts associated with the Account are associated with the Opportunity by default – enough though there are not visible in the Contact Role Viewer. Match My Email will sync emails to all the associated Contacts even though they are undefined and not visible on the Opportunity page. By editing the New Contract Role list and defining either a Primary Contact or giving certain Contacts Roles, then the email matching can be limited to only those Contacts with Roles.

Contact Roles unrelated to an Account can be added to the New Contact Role List. To match emails to these “unrelated” Contact Roles make sure you either assign them as the Primary Contact or give them a Role.

If you would like a training session from our Support Staff on how Contact Roles work in the context of automated email integration for Salesforce.com, please contact support@matchmyemail.com.

Match My Email offers the best Salesforce.com email integration in the cloud for Outlook, Gmail, Google Apps, Lotus, Exchange, Office 365 Live, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Yahoo!, Namesco, Bluehost, Silversky, Strato, 1&1,Sherweb, and any IMAP compatible email server or service.

An automated email syncing and logging solution has tremendous advantages, with the only major drawback being that set up takes approximately 50 minutes compared to about 5 minutes for a manual plug-in.

Beyond the initial time investment, the advantages are significant. An automated system delivers daily productivity gains. Being automated means no one needs to be logged in for it to work, and sales reps who are on vacation, out sick, or traveling still have their emails logged. Being automated also means it saves time. By saving the 4 seconds it takes to click on the “Add to Salesforce” button in the email and bind an email to the right record in SFDC, Match My Email saves the average sales rep about 15 hours per year – or almost two days of work.

Being automated, Match My Email can also deliver a 100% complete email log in each Salesforce.com record that you can trust. With a manual system, one can’t be sure the email log in a Salesforce.com record is complete and accurate. Sales reps may forget to log emails, may be out sick, or traveling for work or vacation. Thus, having confidence that the records in Salesforce.com truly reflect the full customer interaction is never there. Sales rep waste time double-checking the customer email threads by looking them up in their email accounts. If a sales rep double checks a customer email thread 10 times per day , at 75 seconds per keyword lookup, the sales rep is spending up to 80 hours/user/year unnecessarily.

Only an automated system can build a “system of record”; an email archive that the entire organization can rely on and trust. With 100% complete information, managers can better monitor the sales process, evaluate performance in real time and confidently generate accurate reports for presentation to executives.

To learn more about Match My Email check out our new demo video at www.matchmyemail.com. Try it on a 30-day free trial with free support and training.

FuseMail® is a the email hosting brand of j2 Global, Inc., a global communications specialist [NASDAQ: JCOM], with office locations worldwide, including Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Dublin. Fusemail has been in the email hosting business for 18 years and has 12 million mailboxes under management. Its email cloud services include hosted email, including hosted Microsoft Exchange, an award-winning integrated email security suite, email archiving, desktop-to-desktop email encryption and email continuity. FuseMail provides hosted email services to SMBs, government bodies and ISPs located throughout the world.

Now Fusemail customers can benefit from the Salesforce.com email integration solution offered by Match My Email, because Fusemail embraces the IMAP standard in all its hosted email offerings. Match My Email works with Outlook, MacMail, webmail, Lotus, OXsuite, Thunderbird, and Gmail — all at once.

Automated email integration systems like Match My Email offer large productivity improvements. Based real world data, the average sales rep receives and sends 45 emails per day; 50% of those emails are relevant to customer records in Salesforce.com and need to be sorted and filed into the SFDC. Logging and syncing emails manually is estimated to use up 100 hours of sales rep time each year, equivalent to 2 ½ full work weeks.

Once the emails are uploaded to Salesforce.com, they are permanent records. Permanent records take up storage space and from time to time become orphaned. Removing extraneous, obsolete and unneeded emails becomes a requirement as a Salesforce.com implementation matures whether the emails are logged manually or automatically.

This week, Match My Email added the first set of email clean up tools that reside inside Salesforce.com. These tools work on two levels: remove the email entirely versus remove the related object link to a record but keep the email. The Delete button and Mass Delete checkboxes in Email Messages remove the entire email object from Salesforce.com. The Mass Delete checkboxes are particularly important because they allow for very fast clean up.

The UnMatch or Mass Unmatch button inside each record type – Lead, Contact, Account, Opportunity or Case – deletes the related object link between the Email Message and the individual record. Unmatch removes the spoke or related object link pointing from the junction object, in this case an Email Message, to the individual record.

Match My Email is dedicated to continuous improvement, the Japanese concept of Kaizen. Twice per month Match My Email releases new features in either its integration cloud or custom object installation package inside Salesforce.com. Our Kaizen process is 100% driven by customer feedback.

Recent improvements include: Legacy Email import, Creating new SFDC records from email data, forcing email matches to unrelated records, domain-wide email Ignores based on email address fragments, large attachment handling, OAuth implementation for Salesforce.com, Gmail and Google Apps, screen views based on previous user behavior, and now email clean up tools in Salesforce.com.

For most things in life, the more you buy the lower the unit price. Volume discounts are the norm in commercial and private transactions. Purchasing volume translates into pricing power. But in the cloud, surprisingly, the inverse relationship often takes place; small consumers get a better deal than large corporations.

Salesforce.com with the Mail My Email, the email integration add-on, is a case in point. Salesforce.com offers a Group Edition that costs $25 per user per month. True, the Group Edition is limited to five users in an “organization”. Above five users, you have to buy the Professional Edition for $65 per user per month – not very fair to the six-person companies of the world. The Group Edition has other limitations, most important of which is that it only works with one external application. Most Salesforce.com “organizations” do need at least two external ‘apps’ to be competitive, namely an email syncing and logging tool and a web form-to-Lead solution.

But from a data and file storage perspective, the Group Edition is a much better deal than the larger and more costly editions. All Salesforce.com editions include a minimum 1GB of Data Storage and 11GB of File Storage per “organization”. Data Storage is where structured data is stored; structured data can be full-text searched for easier retrieval. File Storage stores unstructured data or a whole file by its file format or extension type; File Storage cannot be full text searched, but it does have the advantage that it retains its native image resolution and formatting.

Storage space is really important if the goal of a CRM system is to have all of the interactions with the customer or account in one convenient place – phone calls and emails. Otherwise, the sales rep wastes a lot of time jumping back and forward between the CRM and their email account. So the key to CRM productivity is to have all the email messages with external customers and prospects embedded into each customer record. This is what the Match My Email add-on does. It syncs and logs emails to records in Salesforce.com, fully automatically, in the cloud. But emails take up space in Salesforce.com.

With Salesforce.com, for a Group Edition organization with five users, each user is allocated 200MB of Data Storage and 2.2GB of File Storage. Data Storage is used to store the email body, while File Storage is where attachments are stored. With the Group Edition including the Match My Email plug-in, each user can store 33,333 emails before he or she runs out of space. Based on actual usage data compiled by Match My Email, the average sales rep logs 25 emails per day to Salesforce.com, about one every twenty minutes. At that rate, a Group Edition organization with five users can store four years worth of emails in Salesforce.com before running out of space. [A single user gets an even better deal and can store more than 10 years of emails without hitting any storage limits].

Compare the Group Edition storage allocations to a Professional Edition organization with 25 users. The Professional Edition organization only gets 40MB of Data Storage per user – 1/5 of the Group Edition — and 612MB of File Storage per user (minimum File Storage per user with Salesforce.com is 612MB). For a 25-person Professional Edition SFDC organization, each user can store only 9 months worth of email before he or she runs out of Data Storage. Then the company has to pay Salesforce.com an additional $300 per year or $25 per month to get each user an additional year of email storage capacity. That is an extra $7,500 per year for the organization for each year of stored email in Salesforce.com.

Even worse is the Enterprise Edition with 50 users. The Enterprise Edition organization only gets 20MB per of Data Storage per user – 1/10 of what the Group Edition organization gets. 20MB equates to a 4-month supply of Data Storage for emails.

The Unlimited Edition offers 120MB of Data Storage per user, but it costs an extra $125 per month or $1,500 per year. The Extra 100MB of Data Storage costs, after adjustments for added functionality, is the equivalent of $6,000 per GB per year. Salesforce.com Data Storage is prohibitively expensive and limits the ability of larger companies to implement email integration into their Salesforce.com “organization”. Even IBM mainframe storage is cheaper than that.

20MB of Data File storage per user is a very small storage allotment for an Enterprise Edition implementation of more than 49 users. It reminds me of the disk drive on my first MacIntosh in 1990. It belongs to a bygone world of green screens and alphanumeric rending, not the age of high definition, touch, social networking and the iPhone with its 64GB of onboard memory. [64GB of Data Storage at Salesforce.com costs $384,000 per year, say what?].

Salesforce.com needs to rethink their Data Storage pricing. It defies common sense because Data Storage is more expensive the more of it the company needs and purchases. It also makes email integration prohibitively expensive for large organizations – yet large organizations need email integration due to their complexity and turnover even more than small organizations. This may be a conscious Salesforce strategy to reduce processing load and the size of the overall database in their cloud, but it needs to be changed. Data Storage should be cheap.

Salesforce.com storage pricing policies discriminate against large companies – unless list pricing is a total shame – and favor small companies.

Small appears to be beautiful at Salesforce.com.

Match My Email is a radically new approach to email integration.  It offers TRUE INTEGRATION that is fully automated and always on.  Match My Email does all the work of syncing and logging emails to Salesforce.com records for you.  The sales rep never has to manually log emails again.  Never.

Match My Email offers the best email integration between Outlook and Salesforce. No more jumping back and forth between Salesforce and Outlook looking at emails to see what is going on with a customer. All the emails in Outlook will be in Salesforce, matched to the right record.

MME provides a fully automated cloud service. It does all the work of syncing and logging emails to Salesforce for a sales rep using Outlook. The computer software does all the processing related to the sorting and uploading of emails and their attachments to the right Salesforce record(s). That is why it is called Match My Email; it matches your emails in Outlook to all the right records in Salesforce.com — fully automatically. The other tools on the market are manual. They require constant action and attention. If you are busy or sick or traveling or on vacation, they don’t work. Match My Email, on the other hand, is 24/7/365, working away in the background, doing the work of matching emails in Outlook to Salesforce for you. True email integration between Outlook and Salesforce is estimated to save the average user 100 hours of work each year.

Match My Email is easy to use and quick to set up. Once it is installed, it starts working in background parsing your emails in Outlook looking for email addresses that match to email addresses in Salesforce.com. When MME finds a match, it uploads and logs the email into the right Salesforce record — whether it is a Lead, Contact, Account, Opportunity or Case.

The best way to see Match My Email in action is to schedule a 20-minute live demo. In the demo, we will show you how Match My Email will automatically connect your email in Outlook to Salesforce.com. Contact Simone at sduncan @matchmyemail.com to schedule a live demo.

When considering email integration for Salesforce.com, there is really only one fundamental decision: manual versus automated. Each approach has its pros and cons which must be weighted against the finite demands of time and energy.

Match My Email is the only solution offered for Salesforce.com on the AppExchange that is militantly automated. Every aspect and feature of Match My Email is designed to remove the job of email syncing and logging from the sales rep and move it to the computer. By automating email logging, sales management also benefits; executives gain email activity reports that are 100% accurate and up-to-date. Match My Email is adamant about email automation because we think that it is the right approach to customer relationship management. That said, Match My Email includes a manual safety net for those users who can’t totally give up control.

What are the major pros and cons of manual versus automated email sorting and uploading?

Contact Simone (sduncan [a] matchmyemail.com) to arrange a live demo or 30-day free trial.

To make email automation works within Salesforce.com, a developer must navigate the many Salesforce limitations by Edition imposed by SFDC on its users. Salesforce.com limitations by edition are listed on this page: http://na4.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/limits.htm.

One of the most annoying limitations in all Editions – Group, Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited — is the attachment size limit. Salesforce.com blocks the upload of any attachment larger than 5MB. With the increase in video and pdf attachments, this size limit is impacting more and more users. Match My Email, true to its fully automated promise, has implemented a new attachment logging feature that works around this limit and provides seamlessly functionality and a 100% complete and accurate email archive in Salesforce.com. Now, attachments up to 30MB are imported into the Match My Email mini-cloud for normal processing. Attachments less than 5MB are permanently uploaded to Salesforce.com; any attachment larger than 5MB is log to Salesforce.com as descriptor and a temporary backlink. The NAME of the attachment is shown permanently in the EMAIL MESSAGES view within every PAGE LAYOUT in Salesforce. For 45 days, the descriptor contains a live link that points back to the attachment stored in the Match My Email mini-cloud.

Match My Email offers its users very rapid improvements included in the regular subscription price. Because Match My Email is cloud technology, these upgrades are done in background, every other weekend. Users suddenly have new functionality at their fingertips. Upgrades are driven directly in response to customer requests. Every organization uses Salesforce.com differently and it is Match My Email pledge to work with them all. Examples of new features in the last six months are

1. Bulk Old/Legacy Email Imports
2. Create New SFDC Records Directly From Email Data
3. Domain-wide Ignores
4. Mass Delete
5. Secondary Email Address Matching
6. Email Activity Reports and Dashboards, and now
7. Large Attachment Handling.

The best way to get to know Match My Email is a 20-minute, live demo. Contact Simone at info ( a ) matchmyemail.com to schedule your demo.

Match My Email can help you sync Office 365 Live  email to Salesforce.com, sync Google Apps email to Salesforce.com, sync Gmail to Salesforce.com, sync Lotus Notes email to Salesforce.com, sync Lotus Domino email to Salesforce.com, sync Outlook 2003 email to Salesforce.com, sync Outlook 2007 email to Salesforce.com, sync Outlook 2010 email to Salesforce.com, sync Outlook 2011 for Mac email to Salesforce.com, sync MacMail to Salesforce.com, sync Apple Mail to Salesforce.com, sync Entourage email to Salesforce.com, syn Open-Xchange email to Salesforce.com, sync GoDaddy email to Salesforce.com, sync Rackspace email to Salesforce.com, sync 1&1 email to Salesforce.com, sync Network Solutions email to Salesforce.com, sync Fasthosts email to Salesforce.com, sync Hostways email to Salesforce.com, sync Strato email to Salesforce.com, sync any IMAP email server to Salesforce.com, sync Thunderbird to Salesforce.com.

One reason that GoDaddy is so popular is that it offers excellent value and amazing customer service.  Match My Email also offers a great deal and the best support team in the business.

For only $14.95 per user per month, our fully automated email syncing and logging system will free you from manual email syncing chores forever. Manual syncing tools like Salesforce for Outlook force a sales rep to spend 100 hours per year posting emails to SFDC. Manual email uploading is a complete waste of time and incredibly boring and tedious. Match My Email will do the same job for you and take over the task of email sorting and attaching to a Salesforce.com record for you. The system works in the cloud, so it is always on whether or not you are logged into your computer. 24/7/365 service means that you will have a 100% complete email record in Salesforce.com, in every type of Salesforce.com object — Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities and Cases. Knowing that all your business emails are in Salesforce.com means that you will not have to waste time jumping back and forth between the CRM screen and your email INBOX to figure out what is going on with a customer.

The best way to experience Match My Email is through a live demo and free 30-day trial. Contact Simone at sduncan (a) matchmyemail.com to set up an appointment.

Match My Email also works with virtually any email service provided by a web site hosting provider. It works with Outlook, Gmail and MacMail, all at once. We have customers who use Network Solutions, Sherweb, Rackspace, Fasthosts, Hostway, Yahoo!, AOL, gmx.de, Stratos, and 1&1, to name a few.