Customers
Email from the CRM
It goes out over your own mailbox, never over ours — and the permission to read that mailbox is used for one narrow thing.
You connect your own Google or Microsoft mailbox, and CRM email is sent through it. The product has its own transport and deliberately does not use it for this.
Why not send from the product's own address
It would do three kinds of damage at once. The reply would not thread back — the client answers into a conversation the CRM cannot see. The recipient would look for a domain they do not recognise. And outbound sales volume would land on a mail reputation built for transactional notifications, which is the thing that eventually stops somebody's password reset arriving.
What the permission is used for
Connecting asks for permission to send as you and to read the mailbox. Reading is how a reply finds its way back to the right record, and it is deliberately narrow.
Only replies to messages sent from here are recorded
Everything else the mailbox receives is examined, matched against nothing, and dropped. Logging every message from anybody who happens to be a contact would put a person's dentist appointment on a client record because it came from the same address — and it would make connecting a mailbox an act nobody senior would authorise. The restraint is a rule in the code, not a promise in a settings screen.
Threading
A reply is matched by the mail headers every client actually uses, not by subject line. Matching on subject is what produces one thread per *Re: Re: Re:* and a second one the moment somebody edits the wording.
Where a message answers a long thread, it is filed against the nearest message we know about rather than the oldest. The first message in a chain is often about a different deal, and anchoring there would file today's reply under last year's conversation.
If you have no mailbox to connect
A tenant with no mailbox to connect can send through the deployment's own transport instead. That works, and every surface that offers it says what it costs: the message goes out from our address rather than yours, it will not thread, and the reply lands in your inbox rather than on the timeline here — because there is nothing for it to thread against.
What it will not do
- No tracking pixel. Not now and not later. A read receipt somebody did not agree to is a read receipt.
- No bulk send. This is one-to-one email from a person to a person. Marketing campaigns are a different product with different rules.
- No rich text. Plain text, typed — with templates and snippets to insert, filled on the server so there is no second renderer to disagree about what an unfilled field looks like.
- No attachments yet.
Every send is checked against consent and quiet hours before anything else — including whether your mailbox works. Being told to connect a mailbox in order to send a message the rules were going to refuse teaches you the refusal is a configuration problem.