What is Archiving?
Archiving is the process of capturing and storing email correspondence in a tamper-proof central repository. Redtail links emails located in the archive to their respective contact record(s) within your CRM, using the email address as a unique identifier. In order to link an email to a contact record, the contact's email address that was used for corresponding must be present on the contact record within the CRM and the message must be sent to or received by an email address hosted by Redtail or being journaled to Redtail.
Redtail offers two solutions for the archiving and retention of emails:
Email Hosting Services
As part of our email hosting services, all email correspondence (inbound and outbound) are archived for each email account on the domain. This option requires the user to migrate their email services to Redtail. Redtail would maintain the email accounts on our mail servers and provide support to the subscribers.
Email Archiving
If Redtail is unable to host a user's email, we can host an archive so that the email communication can be captured and linked within the CRM. This option requires the user to provide Redtail with an alternate domain that is not tied to any email addresses. Redtail would create an archive email address on the provided domain, usually called emailarchive@[the domain provided]. Once the archive is established, the user would contact their email administrator to request they establish journaling to the newly created archive address.
We offer each of these options, as Redtail may not be able to assume hosting of some user's email services due to Broker-Dealer restrictions/requirements or due to their particular hosting setup, among other reasons.
What is journaling?
Journaling refers to the ability to record all communications from one location to another. This is generally required by most Broker-Dealers if an outside provider hosts your email.
How does it work at the server level?
For subscribers to Redtail's Email Hosting Service:
When a message is received by the mail server, a copy of the inbound email is sent to the archive prior to the message being delivered to the inbox.
When a message is sent by the server, a copy of the outbound email is sent to the archive prior to the message being sent out to the recipient server.
For subscribers of the Email Archive Service:
At the subscriber's host provider, a journaling ruled is applied to the account. The journaling rule acts similar to the above outlined process in which a copy of all inbound and outbound messages is sent to the archive address we created for the user.
How does it work behind the scenes in the CRM?
A database is linked to an archive by an index created on Redtail's side. Once the index is created, an archiving service runs that scans the emails for email addresses and finds a match within the CRM. The email address is the only source of information that the service is able to redundantly check within the email correspondence and the CRM for the purpose of linking. The archiving service scans emails as they arrive and links them to the appropriate contact record (this can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to several hours, dependent upon volume at the time).
Who can view the emails within the CRM?
There are two viewing permission roles related to users and what emails the user can see. There is a role of Email Admin and then the standard role of Non-Admin.
Email Admin - By default only the database owner's viewing permissions are set to Email Admin. This role allows for the user to view all email correspondence that is linked to contact records within the CRM.
Non-Admin - By default all other users' viewing permissions are set to Non-Admin, which only allows the users to see the email communications that they are included on. This covers both inbound and outbound.
In order for Redtail to set the email viewing permissions from Non-Admin to Admin for users in the database, the database owner must contact Redtail Support to place the request and provide a list of users to be set to Email Admin.
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