Salesforce sync: Email to Anything (E2A)

  • author-thumb
  • Alexey Panteleev
  • February 20, 2022

There is a new capability in our Yoxel Sync app that I wanted to explain better in this post. We call it “Email To Anything”, “Event To Anything” (E2A).

The idea is that an email or calendar event that is being logged/synced can be related to any Salesforce object (standard or custom) automatically by defining email/event data extraction rules and Salesforce object lookup rules. For example:

  1. Define a regular expression to extract an ID from email subject.
  2. Then use the extracted ID to lookup up an Opportunity or Case object that specifies this ID in a custom field.
  3. Log the email to the matched Opportunity record.

As a Salesforce admin you would have to navigate to the Yoxel Sync admin page first and implement this configuration for one of your templates.

Choose a Salesforce object

Scroll down to the ‘Email sync settings’ section and choose an object that emails should be logged to (Opportunity, Case, or any custom object), then select the ‘custom logic’ lookup mode, then select which object field should be matched during the lookup (i.e. CaseNumber).

E2A lookup

Define a variable

Define a data extraction rule from email (or event, if you’re setting this up for your calendar sync). Click ‘Define variable’ and you will be able to specify a regular expression to be applied to an email field.

In this example we want to extract an all digits ID from email subject E2A variable

You should test your regular expression, and the dialog allows you to do so. Once you’re satisfied with your regular expression click OK to save it. Now your custom lookup rule looks like this:

E2A final rule

You can add more lookup rules for the chosen object. The sync engine will try one by one until a matching Salesforce object is found.

Publish your template once you are done defining your E2A rule!

Use cases

Here are some use cases we’ve supported with this functionality:

  1. Using Yoxel Sync for logging emails from multiple mailboxes to Case objects. Detect case number in email subject. It could be a topic for another post: why this approach is a viable alternative to Salesforce’s email2case service.
  2. Log email applications to Opportunities. Detect an application ID in email subject or body, match it to a custom field in the opportunity object.
  3. Log email to a custom Opportunity or Case object, or a sub-object like Mortgage. Detect a candidate/applicant ID in email subject or body, match to a corresponding ID field in the custom object