Introduction

What are Email Clients?
Email clients are applications or services that allow you to send, receive, and manage your emails efficiently. Common examples include Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, and Office 365. These tools form the backbone of day-to-day communication for individuals and businesses alike.

How Does Auto-Forwarding Work?
Auto-forwarding is a convenient feature that automatically redirects incoming emails from one account to another. This eliminates the need to manually check multiple inboxes and ensures that important messages reach the right place without delay.

A Practical Example
Imagine your support team uses the email address [email protected] with Gmail. At the same time, you rely on Vtiger CRM to track customer information and manage product or service issues raised by customers. 

Without auto-forwarding, you would need to manually review customer issues in your Gmail inbox and then log them into the CRM, an extra step that can be time-consuming.

With auto-forwarding, this process becomes seamless. All emails sent to your support inbox can be automatically forwarded to Vtiger CRM. This is made possible through the Vtiger Mailroom, which acts as a bridge between your email account and the CRM. By adding the Mailroom address to your Gmail auto-forwarding settings, every customer issue received in your Gmail inbox is automatically forwarded to Vtiger’s Inbox.

What’s more, the Mailroom doesn’t just forward messages, it can also create different records inside the CRM based on the forwarded emails, helping you streamline issue tracking and customer management.

Note: 

• To use Inbox or Mailroom in Vtiger CRM, verify your email address first.
• The steps to auto-forward emails for personal and shared mailboxes are different. To learn more about them, click here.
• Computer applications or email services that help you manage your emails are called Email Clients. For example, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, etc.

Benefits of using Vtiger’s Auto-forwarding Support

The benefits of using Vtiger’s auto-forwarding support are:

• Forward your emails from multiple email services to Vtiger CRM
• Avoid logging in to multiple email clients
• Eliminate the need to switch between multiple email IDs to keep track of emails 

In this article, you will learn about:

• Auto-forwarding emails to Vtiger 
• Setting up Auto-forwarding in Email Clients

Setting up Auto-forwarding in Email Clients

Forwarding emails from Individual Email boxes:

Gmail

Step 1: On the Gmail tab
Follow these steps to set up auto-forwarding in Gmail:

1. Log in to the Gmail account you have set up as a mailbox in Vtiger CRM.
2. Go to your Gmail.
3. Click the Settings icon located on the top right.
4. Click See all settings.
5. Click the Forwarding and Pop/IMAP tab.
6. Click the Add a Forwarding Address button under the Forwarding section.
7. Enter your mailroom address in the textbox. 
   1. You can find your mailroom address under Inbox > Configure > Automate Tasks.
8. Click Next > Proceed> OK. 
   1. A verification email will be sent to the mailroom. 

Step 2: On the CRM tab
Follow these steps to verify the email:

1. Log in to the CRM.
2. Click the User Menu on the top right corner of the screen.
3. Click Settings.
4. Look for the Automation section.
5. Open the email and click the verification in the email. 
6. Click Confirm.

Step 3: On the Gmail tab
Follow these steps to set up the forward process: 

1. Go to the Settings page.
2. Select Forward a copy of incoming mail to and select the forwarding address (vtiger mailroom address) and fill out other details.
3. Click Save Changes.

To stop auto-forwarding your emails, select Disable Forwarding in the Forwarding section.​​​​​​

Microsoft Outlook 

Follow these steps to set up auto-forwarding in Outlook:

1. Log in to the Outlook account that you have set up as a mailbox in Vtiger CRM.
2. Click the Settings icon located on the top right.
3. Click View all Outlook settings.
4. Select Settings > Mail > Forwarding.
5. Select the Enable forwarding checkbox.
   1. Note: Uncheck the Enable forwarding checkbox to stop auto-forwarding your emails.
6. Enter your mailroom address in the textbox.
7. Select the Keep a copy of forwarded messages checkbox if you want to keep a copy in Outlook.
8. Click Save.

You must take an additional step in Microsoft Office 365 to complete the process.

As part of their outbound spam protection, Office 365 accounts, by default, block automatic email forwarding. If external forwarding is disabled for your Office 365 account, you will see a bounce message in your Office 365 inbox after attempting to set up auto-forwarding to Vtiger.

The text of the bounce will include this line: 550 5.7.520 Access denied. Your organization does not allow external forwarding. Please contact your administrator for further assistance. AS(7555)

To avoid this error, your administrator must make the following changes:

1. Log in to your Office 365 Security & Compliance portal.
2. Go to Policies & rules on the left menu.
3. Select Threat policies.
4. Search for the Policies section and click the Anti-spam block.
5. Click on Anti-spam outbound policy (Default).
6. Scroll to click the Edit protection settings link at the bottom of the sidebar.
7. Go to the Forwarding Rules section and click the Automatic forwarding rules dropdown.
8. Choose On - Forwarding is enabled option. 
   1. Note: You will be unable to set up auto-forwarding if your user role does not have permission to configure outbound spam filters in Office 365.
   2. To add, modify, and delete outbound spam policies, you need to:
      1. Be a member of the Organization's Management or Security Administrator role groups or,
      2. Reach out to the Admin user of your Office 365 account to give you the required permission.
      3. Only the users in the above-mentioned groups can configure outbound spam filtering in EOP.
9. Click Save.