Your emails in Odoo: no more copy-pasting from Outlook

Your client information lives in two places at once. Projects, invoices and quotes are in your management system. But the conversations, the real ones, where the client explains their need, accepts a proposal or reports a problem, are scattered across your team's personal mailboxes. And those two worlds don't talk to each other.

You know the consequences: someone goes on vacation and a file freezes because all the correspondence is in their mailbox. An employee leaves and three years of client history become unreadable. Two people answer the same client at the same time, or nobody answers at all.

Copy-paste, the symptom of a system that doesn't hold up

We've all practised the homemade fix: copy the important email and paste it into the task notes. You end up with truncated text, no attachments, no follow-up to the conversation, pasted there by the one person who thought of it. Three weeks later, there's no telling whether anyone replied, or what they said.

Odoo can already receive emails on its records, but only if the client writes to the right magic address. In real life, clients reply to the person, not the file. The gap to close was between the mailbox, where the work arrives, and the ERP, where the work gets managed.

An inbox right inside your ERP

Our module adds a full inbox to Odoo. Each person connects their own mailbox, with their own credentials: no shared account, no team password lying around. Your emails show up as they arrive, alongside messages already linked to Odoo files, in a single list, with no duplicates.

The centrepiece is the filing. An email that doesn't belong to any file yet is flagged as an "orphan": two clicks, and it joins the relevant task, ticket or invoice, with its full conversation thread and attachments. Better yet: if an email needs to become a new file, one click turns it into a task, a lead, a ticket, an expense or an invoice. The entire email, body and attachments, lands in the new file's history, not just a snippet pasted into a note. And you reply or forward without leaving Odoo, with your signature: the reply files itself in the right place.

The rest is everyday comfort: marking emails read, replied or handled, snoozing one until tomorrow morning, browsing your folders like in Thunderbird, doing everything from the keyboard. A reading pane opens next to the list, on the right or at the bottom as you prefer: click an email, read it, reply, file it, move to the next one. And a dashboard shows incoming volume, pending emails and average response time: numbers no personal mailbox will ever give you.

Sorting that takes care of itself

A newsletter, an automated notice, a "noreply": that kind of mail doesn't need your immediate attention. You set simple rules, a sender, a word in the subject, or the presence of an unsubscribe link, and the module files, prioritises or clears the message out of the inbox on its own. Your inbox keeps in view only what needs a real reply.

What changes when someone is away

The decisive test is absence. With history attached to the files, the colleague taking over opens the task and reads the whole correspondence, in order, without digging through anyone's mailbox. The new hire does the same on day one. And when a client claims "I wrote you about this in March", the answer is one click away, not in a former employee's archives.

It's the same principle we apply everywhere: information belongs to the file, not to the individual who received it.

Mind the email policy!

The module connects over IMAP, the open standard for accessing mailboxes. Microsoft 365, Gmail and independent providers like ours all speak it, but some business accounts have it disabled by internal policy: it has to be turned on first. Next, it's a desktop tool inside Odoo, not a mobile email app: on your phone, your usual app is still the fastest way to reply. And it's not a bulk-sending tool: for newsletters, stick with a dedicated tool.

Then there's storage: keeping the full history of several mailboxes uses disk space. On properly sized hosting it's negligible, but a 50,000-email mailbox doesn't weigh nothing.

How we do it

We connect the module to your current email provider: no need to switch. That said, it's often the moment our clients start asking the bigger email questions: whether to host it themselves, and why some messages end up in junk. The three topics go well together: once you take email seriously as infrastructure, you might as well do it properly.

If your client history is scattered across four Outlook mailboxes, let's talk about your email.

Sources

• The bf_email_management module on our GitHub repository and its card on our modules page
• IMAP (RFC 9051) : the open standard used to connect to your mailbox