Email & Calendar

HotCRM turns customer conversations into records you can query: an email you send from a contact, a call you log on a deal, a meeting you book for next week. What it does not do yet is reach into your mailbox — the app ships no Gmail or Outlook connector, so nothing arrives in HotCRM merely because it landed in your inbox.

Read this before following a setup step. Every heading below marked (not shipped yet) describes the inbox / calendar integration as designed — it is on the roadmap, not a switch you can turn on today. The unmarked sections describe what the app actually writes.

What ships today

• ✉️ Send Email from a contact record — queues the message through the platform email service and leaves an entry on the contact's timeline.
• 📞 Log a Call, Log a Meeting and Schedule a Meeting on every lead, contact, account, opportunity and case — each writes a real Event record with attendee rows. See Meetings & Calls.
• ✍️ AI email drafting — the assistant writes the copy; you review it and press Send Email yourself.
• 🕒 Interaction recency — sending an email, or holding a meeting, refreshes the customer's Last Contacted / Last Activity stamps.

"Send Email" from a contact

Send Email is registered on the contact record, and it is hidden on a contact with Email Opt Out ticked. Opportunities and cases carry the three activity actions below, not this one.

1. The action asks for a Subject and a Body. The recipient is the contact's own email address; there is no template picker and no merge-field expansion.
2. On submit an email row is written with status Queued, sent from your user's email address and linked back to the contact under Related Object.
3. The contact's Activity timeline gains an entry — Email: <subject> — that points at that email row, so the drill-through opens the message rather than a summary string.
4. The contact's Last Contacted Date, and the parent account's Last Activity Date, are stamped. An email is an interaction, even though it is not a calendar slot, so it refreshes the same recency clock a held meeting does — see Meetings & Calls.

Delivery belongs to the platform's email service, which owns the states the row moves through: Queued → Sent, or Failed with the transport's error message and an attempt count. Whether the message leaves the building depends on the transport your deployment configures — with no provider configured the platform falls back to a log-only transport, which records the message and sends nothing.

Replies are not threaded back. A reply the customer sends arrives in your mailbox and stops there: matching it onto the record needs the inbox connector, which is not shipped. Log the substance as a call or a meeting if the next person needs it.

AI-drafted emails

Ask the AI assistant to draft an email on any record — the Email Drafting skill is shared by the sales and service skill sets:

1. It grounds itself in the live record first, then writes the subject and body, and offers two subject-line variants with a recommendation.
2. It stops there. The skill carries no send tool, and it says so plainly rather than implying a send is queued.
3. You take the copy into Send Email on the contact, review it, and send — through the platform email service described above, not through your own mailbox.

That review step is deliberate rather than a gap: outbound email is exactly the thing worth having a human read first.

"Log a Call" from any record

The Log a Call action records an outbound or inbound call without leaving the record. It does not write a lone timeline string: one submit writes three things.

1. The event — a real Event record with your subject, type Call, status Held, starting now, plus duration, notes, owner, and a link back to the record you fired the action from.
2. The attendees — one row per person: you as the organizer with your response already Accepted, the contact or lead you fired the action from, and anyone you picked under Contact Attendees / Internal Attendees.
3. A timeline entry on the record's Activity tab, pointing at that event, so the drill-through opens the real record.

Log a Meeting and Schedule a Meeting are the same shape — held meeting, and booking for later. Meetings & Calls is the full account: what each form asks for, Planned vs Held, what attendee rows hold, and how a held call on a case stamps its First Response Date.

Held calls and meetings are counted on the Sales Activity dashboard — Interactions Logged, Customer Minutes, Activity by Rep, Activity Mix — which is where a rep's activity metrics live. The Sales and Customer Service dashboards carry pipeline and case metrics respectively, and no activity tiles; see Dashboards.

Email templates (not shipped yet)

The intended surface: reusable templates saved in Settings → Email Templates, with merge fields ({{Contact.FirstName}}, {{Opportunity.Amount}}), HTML plus plain-text versions, per-team folders, and approval-gated templates for legal-sensitive content — plus the AI assistant personalising a chosen template from record context.

HotCRM ships none of it today. The platform carries an email-template object of its own, used for authentication mail (invitations, password resets); Send Email above does not read it, and this app authors no templates.

Connecting your inbox (not shipped yet)

The intended flow: Settings → Email & Calendar → Connect Gmail / Connect Outlook, an OAuth grant, and a choice of what to sync — all email, tracked email only, or whitelisted customer domains; customer meetings only, or every event.

None of it exists in the app: there is no Gmail or Outlook connector, no such settings page, and no OAuth flow to authorise.

How email logging works (not shipped yet)

The intended behaviour: the connector sees an email between you and a known contact (matched by address), stores the body on the activity timeline of the contact, account and any open opportunity or case, saves attachments as files, and makes it visible to anyone with sharing access to those records — with a personalised forwarding address as the manual fallback.

Today the only email on a timeline is one you sent from Send Email yourself.

Email tracking (not shipped yet)

The intended behaviour: open tracking, click tracking, schedule send, and a reply reminder that bumps the thread back at you after N days, with the tracking events stored on the email, the contact and the originating campaign.

Nothing in the app tracks opens or clicks, schedules a send, or raises a reminder. The one adjacent thing that is real: a campaign member carries First Opened and First Clicked dates — but they have no automatic writer, so a person or an import fills them, not an email pixel. See Campaign Members.

Calendar sync (not shipped yet)

The intended behaviour: a HotCRM Events calendar created in your Google or Outlook account, events flowing both ways, native-calendar events with CRM contacts as attendees landing on those contacts and accounts, and double-booking flagged.

Today a meeting exists in HotCRM only because someone logged or scheduled it here, and it stays here. Your own events are under My Work → My Calendar.

Inbound case email (not shipped yet)

The intended behaviour: point support@yourcompany.com at an inbound address, set a default queue, priority and assignment rules, and every incoming email becomes a case — sender matched or created as a contact, subject and body mapped onto the case, replies threaded back to the customer over email.

The app has no inbound email path. A case's Origin picklist does carry Email, but it is a value someone selects when logging the case by hand.

Privacy & policies

• Email you send from HotCRM is stored in the same database as your CRM records and follows the same sharing rules.
• Recipients marked Email Opt Out cannot be mailed from the app: Send Email is hidden on their record.
• Exclusion lists for specific addresses or domains, BCC handling, and a one-click purge of a contact's email history are not shipped — they belong with the inbox connector above. For a GDPR erasure today, delete the contact's records directly; deleting a person removes their attendee rows and keeps the meetings themselves.

Tips for reps

• ✅ Log the call from the opportunity or the case — the link is what surfaces it there, and the account's clock is stamped for you.
• ✅ Put the real attendees on the call. "Which contacts have never joined one?" is only answerable if you did.
• ✅ Draft with the assistant, then read it before you send — it writes the copy, you own the send.

Tips for admins

• ✅ Configure a real email transport before telling reps that Send Email delivers. With none configured, the platform logs the message and sends nothing.
• ✅ Coach on the Held status: the activity numbers on the Sales Activity dashboard are only as honest as that field.
• ✅ Do not build a process on inbox or calendar sync yet — set expectations from the (not shipped yet) sections above, and watch the roadmap.