BCC
I'm using groove helpdesk and bcc'ing emails to insightly but they are not showing up.
I have a copy of the email header, but I'm reluctant to post it here as it has several email addresses in it. Is there somewhere I can send it to?
I'm using groove helpdesk and bcc'ing emails to insightly but they are not showing up.
I have a copy of the email header, but I'm reluctant to post it here as it has several email addresses in it. Is there somewhere I can send it to?
Comments
Hi Olly,
I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble with this. When you use the BCC field, some email applications don't expose enough information for Insightly to save the message or link it properly. We have a great article that may help: Missing emails when using the BCC field.
Thanks, but it's not really a great article, and doesn't really answer my question. Groove only allows me to automatically bcc, not cc. I'm just trialling insightly but if this doesn't work it's a bit of a deal breaker.
Hi Olly,
I'm sorry the article wasn't helpful. Unfortunately if Groove only allows you to automatically BCC and not CC, then you will continue to have this problem with your emails within Insightly due to way your email provider may be sending over the information.
I am having an issue with the bcc field as well.
I have two profiles in outlook. The original one with my complete name in the email address, and the new profile with first name only.
When using the new profile, the BCC field does not work at all; however, when I use the original email the bcc field works fine.
So this is not a problem with the way my email provider is sending over the information. One profile works, the other doesn't.
Please advise.
MP
There seems to be a lot of people on these forums having issues with the bcc mail feature, as it appears to be an issue that has been raised several times, but the standard response seems to be to blame the sending email software. My email header has the email addresses in it, so I'm not sure why it doesn't work.
Normally when you contact support for a piece of software with an error like this, they would like to see the headers so that they can fix the issue, but your attitude seems to be that's it's tough luck, that's just the way it is.
It's a shame as it looks like quite a nice piece of software, but I won't be able to use it.
Hi Olly,
I'm terrible sorry if my reply came across wrong, we really do try to be here for our customers.
It's been our experience after our team has tested this that when using the BCC field some email applications will not work. Which is why we recommend using the CC field. You can also create a contact in your email address book that contains your Insightly mailbox address, such as "My Insightly Mailbox." You can then use that contact in the CC field to mask the Insightly email address.
I would like to provide you other news, but with our resources currently working on a large development project I wouldn't want to provide you with false hope that this would be looked into right away. Once the development project being worked on is completed our team will be focusing on feature requests and may look closer into the this as well.
Hi Mike,
Perhaps one of our Hero's can help out. :)
Have you tried using Zapier? I don't know if it will help you as I have not used Groove before but they have an integration with Groove and Insightly.
I am not familiar with Groove, but when I encounter an issue with BCC, I can usually forward the email to my Insightly address and it links properly with the names/email addresses in the original email. I realize this doesn't help if NONE of your emails are going through but it might be worth a try!
Can you or your developers at least tell us specifically what info is missing for Insightly when using BCC? I would be happy to give it to my IT guy to take care of on our end.
If the answer is still the same as above, that is too bad. I suggest you send these concerns to your VP's and Presidents. Along with mine below:
I just use plain old Microsoft Outlook and cannot get a BCC to work for the life of me. I have created the Insightly contact in Outlook and given it a different name, but I am not going to use that in a cc field and either risk missing client replies due to the wrong address, or deal with email filters that reject such long unknown email addresses. Furthermore, it is just a bit "tacky" cluing your clients into your CRM tracking procedures. A CRM needs to almost be so easy to use and transparent that one does not need to think about it. The only way now that I can send emails to Insightly is to forward the message from my sent folder afterwards. This is not terrible, but it can slow things up and/or open to the likelihood of forgetting to do it. PLEASE find a way to fix this issue so we can all continue to sing the praises of your product.
Hi Auser,
Here's what I found out, Outlook doesn't pass the header when using BCC. Due to this Insightly is not able to see and translate the information. We have noticed that some older versions of Outlook allow the BCC to come through but it's not something we can guarantee will work.
I apologize for the inconvenience. Please know that our executive team is reading your comments even if you don't hear from them directly.
I worked on this for hours and posted the necessary information to resolve this on this thread, but a fortnight later the post is still pending approval. I'll try again here.
If put the Insightly email address in the CC field, it shows up in my Insightly Inbox. But if I put the same address in the BCC field, it never shows up. That's true with a variety of email clients using a variety of SMTP servers.
The only difference I can see is that when CC'ing, the recipient's email address appears in the headers. In the case of Insightly, that would be the Insightly email address. Does Insightly check if its own address is in the headers? If so, does any email client/server combination exist that includes the BCC address of the recipient? All the support from Insightly puts the blame on our end. Given that people have the same experience with such esoteric clients as Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail and little known SMTP servers like Outlook 365, Gmail and qmail, could we perhaps be thrown a small bone here and be told of just one client/server that does work?
Here is the content received by the recipient (my@email.address) when I send via CC:
And here is the content received by the recipient when I send via BCC (notice the recipient's address does not appear):
Hi!
With BCC, we don't get all the information that is needed. That is the nature of BCC(Blind Carbon Copy). Some email applications work fine but some don't. This article, basically covers it. Using CC, especially with masking is a great idea. So is using Zapier, if it supports your email application. A new outlook gadget is in the works - that should help with any outlook related issues.
Thanks,
Namrata
Thanks for the response Namrata.
I don't know how I can be any clearer. That article is irrelevant. It's about linking, this is about being received at all. Using CC, Zapier or some future gadget are all irrelevant to getting BCC working.
Insightly keep saying "some" applications work fine and "some" information is missing. No one has ever (publicly, that I can see) pointed to any case of any application ever working, nor what information is missing. It's either a secret, a mistake or someone is lying.
Please either admit BCC doesn't work so we can all get on with using workarounds instead, or let us know what this magic process is that makes it work.
I just tested with gmail with my mailbox address added as BCC and the email is saved and linked correctly.
Perfect! I used the web interface for Gmail and got this:
Sure enough, the BCC appears in the header! Oddly enough it also has the from address as the "Delivered-To" header, but that's by-the-by.
So results so far seem to be:
So, Heath, are you suggesting we just use Gmail (hotmail in my case) when we use Insightly? If so, it's not really the professional solution I'm looking for either. The entire reason I want BCC to work is so that my clients don't see me tracking them with a 3rd party CRM. It's extremely unprofessional to show your clients your tracking techniques. The other part is the convenience and habitual frequency of being able to BCC vs. always having to go back into my sent box and forward emails. However, using a non company email like my hotmail or a Gmail account is in my opinion, infinitely less professional than letting my clients see behind the curtain when I'm cc-ing them. Nonetheless, between using non company email and showing my clients they are ccing my Insightly email, I really hate both options and will not choose either. I just hate the generic non-company email a bit more.
Luckily I do have an Outlook/Exchange account for work and also my own email server (Postfix on Linux) to receive emails to as a test. I have sent an email from my work account to my work account with the private account BCc'd in.
This is what the private account sees in the email's full header information (obviously with my email addresses and IP anonymised):
Please note the lines in bold: They show the email address that was the BCc recipient in the X-Original-To and Delivered-To fields, whereas the "From" and "To" fields show my work address as the sender and primary recipient.
Obviously the BCc information was not included in the email header generated by Outlook, as that's what the B in BCc means. But it was included in the email envelope, specifically in the RCPT TO: command of the STMP servers. After all, somehow the email has to be delivered to the correct server (in this case: my private server), and that server had to know the exact address in order to decide which mailbox to stick it into.
Now apparently some mailservers discard this vital piece of information about incoming emails once they're delivered, but as we see from the above example, it is actually there and can be saved (as it is by Postfix). This has exactly nothing to do with the sending SMTP server and everything with what the recipient makes of it.
So I can't see a reason why Insightly's mail system isn't using the same RCPT TO: information on incoming mail to capture what address it received a mail on as a BCc'd recipient. Especially when an Opportunity-specific email address is used, this would be the obvious solution.
Being able to BCc emails to Insightly as opposed to having to Cc or manually forward them is basic functionality for a professional CRM, and it is missing. There should be an excellent excuse as to why it hasn't been implemented years ago along the lines explained above.
Auser Aone, I'm suggesting we should consider Insightly does not support BCC except by some quirk that currently only works via the Gmail client.
Anna that's very clear. Insightly's apparent choice to rely on the BCC header is disappointing.
Hi Heath, your conclusions are correct from your post on August 16.
In order for Insightly to pick up and link emails, they need to contain the Bcc header. That's how we find and identify the account in Insightly. And not all the mailboxes provide that information.
Sorry for the confusion caused by it. If it's acceptable I would suggest using CC instead, it works consistently independent of email provider.
Sona,
including a Bcc header is only one of 3 ways of email programs (and servers) handling sending emails to Bcc recipients, and not used by many of the standard mail setups, most notably the predominant business tool Outlook. Please refer (and point the developers) to Section 3.6.3 of RFC 2822, the document specifying the technical details of how e-mail works.
In contrast, there is a reliable way for a recipient running their own mail server to find out what address they received an email on, that works regardless of whether they were a To:, a Cc: or a Bcc:, and independently of the sending email system: This is by looking at the RCPT TO address that was used in transmitting the message. This information is usually written to the trace records (the lines starting with Received: ...) and depending on the receiving SMTP server also in custom header fields such as "X-Original-To".
Long story short: as Insightly clearly run their own mail receiving system, it should be very easy to capture and parse this address information for all Bcc emails. If your developers have difficulty with this, please get in touch and I will be happy to point you to some highly qualified web application developers with extensive experience in dealing with complex email systems, so they might help your team out in getting this essential feature going.
Has this been fixed or is it still a bug?
Considering whether to use Insightly for a new process that will rely on BCC from Groove.
Hi All,
Hope you're having a great day, and thank you for providing us with information to look into.
I'll be escalating this up to our Engineering Team to see if we can develop a possible "catch-all" resolution to the BCC issue.
Once we learn more, we'll be posting an update on this thread.
Hi All,
Thank you for waiting while we looked into this issue.
I spoke with our Engineering Team and they informed me that due to specific email configurations per user, we’re unable to develop a “catch-all” solution.
This is due to some email configurations not including specific information Insightly needs to save or link the email.
In some cases, this is also due to the email being sent to Insightly in a format we cannot read.
We can guarantee that the CC field will work when forwarding emails into Insightly.
If you’re having issues with the CC field not working as intended, please reach out to us and we’ll look into that for you.
Then can I implore you to take up Anna Foeglein's offer from Sept 14? There's is a great deal of evidence that it is possible and it would make a big improvement for your customers. FWIW, we've stopped using Insightly while this is dealt with.
BTW, this forum no longer seems to support logging in with Safari. I had to switch to Firefox.
Dear Ev,
this answer is very unsatisfactory, but at least now we know not to wait for Insightly to implement a basic aspect of email handling. It's not exactly a great look, as most other vendors and certainly every single email provider have figured it out long ago, receiving and delivering Bcc'd email from all kinds of clients (including Outlook) to the correct recipient without any problems. However, this is a good indicator of the quality of service to expect in the future.
PS The forum login button isn't working on Chrome, either.
What is the status with this BCC problem?
I am making a decision whether to renew with Insightly this week. I am currently unable to use the product due to the malfunctioning BCC connection.
Please advise.
Hello Devin,
At this time Insightly still recommends adding your Insightly mailbox address to the CC line should work fine. I understand your frustrations and I suggest posting your request to our Ideas & Suggestions page where other Insightly users can vote and comment on this post. In general, the more activity a request receives, the more likely it is to be considered for implementation.
Thanks for your time and feedback!
Post is closed for comments.