Associating Messages with Contacts

You can use M-Files Admin for specifying messages to be automatically associated with contact persons and customers saved in M-Files on the basis of the sender and recipient information. A message from, for example, [email protected] can be automatically associated with the contact person Matt Bay and the customer ESTT.

When the user is saving an e-mail message to M-Files in Outlook, M-Files looks for similarity between the e-mail addresses in the message and the properties that have been specified in M-Files Admin. On the basis of similarity and the properties specified by the administrator, M-Files automatically associates the message with customers or contact persons when the message is saved in the M-Files folder in Outlook.

Note: The association is possible only if the message is saved in Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013, or 2016.

This automation takes place on a vault-specific basis (with a vault-specific M-Files folder in Outlook), also applying to all subfolders of the M-Files folder in question. The message must be saved via the Save to M-Files function or by dragging the message to the M-Files folder in Outlook. If you drag the message directly to the M-Files user interface, it will not be associated with the customer or contact person.

E-mail Client Integration Settings

To open E-Mail Client Integration Settings:

Open M-Files Admin.
Select a vault in the left-side tree view.
Select Action > E-Mail Client Intergration Settings.

Contact persons

M-Files looks for a full match with a contact person's e-mail address. M-Files associates the message with the contact person Matt Bay if Matt Bay's properties have exactly the same e-mail address as the message does ([email protected]).

Customers

If customer information has been specified in the e-mail integration settings:

M-Files looks for customer matches via the contact person (the Customer object type must be the owner of the Contact person object type): M-Files associates the message with the customer ESTT if Matt Bay is the contact person for ESTT.
M-Files looks for similarity between the domain name in the e-mail address and the customer's properties: M-Files associates the message with the customer ESTT on the basis of the e-mail address domain, matt.bay@estt.com or patsy.bay@estt.com if the domain estt.com can be found in the customer's properties. The message will not be associated with any contact person in this case, unless a full match is found with the contact person information.

E-Mail Client Integration Settings - Advanced

The Advanced tab of the E-Mail Client Integration Settings dialog allows you to further specify associations between e-mail information and M-Files metadata. M-Files automatically populates the metadata card according to the mappings defined in these settings.

First, you can select a default class for all the e-mail messages that are saved to M-Files via Outlook. Secondly, the options allow you to define an appropriate metadata property for each e-mail header field value.

For instance, if you want the information contained in the From field to be automatically inserted to a certain property on the metadata card of the e-mail object, select the appropriate property from the drop-down menu.