How I’ve been handling this is I make a header called “Previous Notes” or “Previous Emails” or whatever.

And I record formatted notes in it. It could have one note, it could have several notes, either on the same page or as seperate.

I foresee that the notes could get quite long someday, but that that is only a small concern for me in the minority of cases.

Thanks for the reply.  My actual problem is how to review all the mail for a particular day, spread over many different contacts and blogs.  I won’t necessarily know what mail has come in, and which PDF’s I need to bring up to review.

You can already do this with “calls” through the activities dashboard, but not notes or files.  And notes/files are not really ideal - something similar to a “call” would seem to be a better fit, a quick specialized “communication” note.

sloughwi - Jun 16, 2010 10:33pm

Thanks for the reply.  My actual problem is how to review all the mail for a particular day, spread over many different contacts and blogs.  I won’t necessarily know what mail has come in, and which PDF’s I need to bring up to review.

You can already do this with “calls” through the activities dashboard, but not notes or files.  And notes/files are not really ideal - something similar to a “call” would seem to be a better fit, a quick specialized “communication” note.

if you use Gmail - smart filters are perfect for this. I have all my different social media updates / lead channels / accounts (contact@, info@ etc.)/ linkedin groups (filter for each important one) all show up in my label sidebar and they’re all color coded.

works amazing.

Hey sloughwi! To give you an idea of our intentions, our email client is not an area that will likely add a ton of new features right now. Solve users have so many email client options that we would just be reinventing the wheel rather than creating features that generate high value. Adrian had a great point, Gmail is so versatile that you can have all your mail sorted the moment it arrives, colour coded and everything. We are also moving towards tighter integration with Google as you may have already noticed. Google also is of the school that communications should be streamlined so that conversation records should be kept together independent of the vehicle they arrived in (email, fax, phone). If others have ideas it would be neat to see what other solutions are out there.

Thanks for the replies but I think somewhere in the discussion my initial request got kind of misunderstood.  My question has nothing to do with email.

My issue is that I have a VA check my _physical snail mail_ (yes, attorneys still get snail mail… lots of it…)  The mail then gets scanned onto my server.  I do not physically handle the snail mail, but I have to review the important stuff each day, and to do that I need a log of what came in so I can pull up the important stuff.

One possible solution is to have the VA send me a “daily log” of all mail that came in via e-mail. 

What seems to make more sense is to use S360.  For each piece of mail, the VA enters an activity entry in S360 under the contact or project.  Then I could just pull up a list of all of those activities for that particular day.

@Ronald: notes would work to record the activity, but one cannot filter notes under the activities dashboard…

@adrian: I too use gmail filters extensively but I’m not sure how they would apply to snail mail :)

Ah, I see. Definitely did not understand the original post then.

Ok, you are saying two things I think:

1) You want to know what comes in each day for your snail mail.
2) You want to know what came in each day/recently for said snail mail per each company/contact.

and you want your assistant to use Solve to get you up to speed.

Based on what you describe, first question I ask is are you sure you need it all that way? Every piece of mail scanned and filtered/sorted/associated with the company?

The easiest is for your assistant to just email you them, or upload them for you at one place for you to sort and attach to contacts/companies/blogs.

The convoluted time consuming way is for your assistant to scan and upload them all to each relevant contacts/companies/blogs and then update a single blog with a note of what came in that day, almost like an index.

This would be time consuming and boring and maybe not even a good use of time, although, I’m sure your assistant will do what she’s paid to do.

I don’t know if that works for you, but test this and a few other workflows out for a week or two and maybe you’ll get an idea of how you want to do it?

Ronald - Jun 18, 2010 02:25pm

Based on what you describe, first question I ask is are you sure you need it all that way? Every piece of mail scanned and filtered/sorted/associated with the company?

I run a paper-less law office, so yes it’s necessary.

Ronald - Jun 18, 2010 02:25pm

The easiest is for your assistant to just email you them, or upload them for you at one place for you to sort and attach to contacts/companies/blogs.

Correct - she scans and stores them on the server.  My question was: how do you “attach to contacts/companies/blogs”?  If you attach the actual file, you cannot effectively filter what came in on any particular day (yet you can do this with calls, tasks, events…)

You can do this with notes BUT there is no way to distinguish mail notes from any other standard sticky notes on the file.

Ronald - Jun 18, 2010 02:25pm

The convoluted time consuming way is for your assistant to scan and upload them all to each relevant contacts/companies/blogs and then update a single blog with a note of what came in that day, almost like an index.

That is an interesting idea but doesn’t accomplish what I want (still does not let me effectively filter activities.)

The whole idea of S360 is to be able to effectively log activities for contacts and projects on a single consolidated screen.  Yes, theoretically I could have my assistant send me a “mail log” by email every night and search for the contact name every time I wanted to identify when I received a letter.  For that matter, I could do the same for call logs, scheduling events, lead tracking, and every other CRM/project function.  S360 is faster and more efficient which is why we all opt to use it over just email.

Even though most of us (including me) do not like snail mail, it’s still a vital part of business and there should be a way to integrate it into S360.

I would suggest changing “log a call” to “log a communication,” add a “type” field defaulted to “call” and add the options “mail” “meeting” “fax” etc.

Another option is to allow notes to be “tagged”; but I don’t particularly like the notes as much as I like the fast plain-text “log a call” activity.

I see. You need to be able to filter the mail that comes in for search.

Question: Your assistant only scans them. No OCR right?

Why not have her email them to the dropbox attaching one scan per and she can put all the descriptive/ID info she wants as the title of the email or in the body. If you come up with a system, then you will see them there.

Yes, it’s mixed up with the actual emails and is a messy way of doing things.

OR, each scan has a filename right? Just put a date stamp in the file name plus description.

Problem solved.

Scan documents and upload to Google Docs folder(s) in your Google Apps domain. This is where you can name / code it and it gets a date time stamp when you touch it (like any file does).  Your Google folders can be by topic (object class) or client or what ever. (standard folder concept).

“>>>
Convert documents - up to 500KB per file:
Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), OpenDocument text (.odt), StarOffice text (.sxw)
Rich text (.rtf), Plain text (.txt), HTML (.htm, .html)
Convert presentations - up to 10MB per file:
Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps)
Convert spreadsheets - up to 1MB per file:
Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx) files, OpenDocument spreadsheets (.ods).
Comma-separated values (.csv)
Some features may not be fully supported when files are converted (for example, footnotes, tables of contents, tracked changes and comments, embedded graphs, pivot tables, and slide animations). Files that you don’t convert (maximum 25 MB per file) will count toward your storage limit.
Convert text from PDF or image files - up to 2M per file:
Photos, scanned documents, screenshots, etc (.jpg, .gif, .png)
PDF files (.pdf)
Graphics are not converted — only text. For the best results, start with high-resolution image files.
Learn about OCR (optical character recognition)
>>>”

Uploading image files with text to Google Docs (OCR)
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=176692&hl=en

Attach the Google file under the contact or company activity it gets a date stamp there when its attached. and it links to the Google document.  see: “Introducing how to work with Activities”
in the Solve training.

Is this kinda what your looking for?

No, sorry.  What I’m looking for is a daily summary.
Example:

- June 30, 2010 -
[Mail In]
* Letter from Attorney Smith re Jones Case dated 6/25/2010
* Solicitation from ABC, Inc.
* Invoice from Secretary Services LLC due 7/15/2010

[Mail Out]
* Copy of Smith Letter to Client Jones
* Doe Summons/Complaint to Secretary Service LLC for service

So whether I attach each of these scans as a file in S360, or a Google Docs, or just a note referencing the entry, what I then need to generate is a daily mail log so I can see all the activity from that day in one screen.

@sloughwi http://elenasinbox.com/search/?q=unbelievable