How do I know 4Degrees is capturing my interactions?
Our users rely on 4Degrees to be a constantly up to date view of their team's network and their communications with that network. To accomplish that, 4Degrees syncs with the relevant MSFT exchange and Gmail servers once every 15 minutes to detect new interactions and update our system accordingly.
If it's been longer than 15 minutes and your latest interactions with your contacts haven't yet been reflected in 4Degrees, there may be an issue with the integration between your email servers and our system. Some troubleshooting steps are below:
1. Are your email and calendar interactions being synced to 4Degrees?
To ensure that's the case, go to the Email Sync page within your account settings. In the "email sync" section of the page, you should check that:
- The email addresses you communicate with professional contacts through regularly are listed.
- They are all set to "On", meaning the system is connected to those accounts and is monitoring them for email and calendar communications. The most common reason for accounts to become unsynced are when you've changed your password (especially in Outlook).
2. Has the contact you're interacting with been created in 4Degrees?
To keep your contact list as useful as possible, we automatically create contacts only when:
- You've exchanged messages with a person directly (i.e., at least one email sent and one received with them) OR Had a meeting with the other person in attendance (i.e., when their email address was included in the calendar invite) AND
- The email message or calendar invite has less than 5 participants total (to avoid adding everyone on a listserv to your contacts, even if you don't know them).
If the contact in question shows up in "Your Contacts", then they have been created in 4Degrees. If the contact doesn't show up in your list but your interactions with them fit the two criteria above, please let us know and we'll investigate!
More details about when we create contacts on your behalf can be found here.
3. Have you interacted with this contact directly?
To avoid cluttering your contact list with contacts who you don’t know, but were cc’ed on an interaction with you, we don't add the email interactions.
4. Do you have a duplicate record for this contact?
4Degrees uses the email address as the unique key to create new contact records. While 4Degrees attempts to identify and merge duplicates on its own, we'd rather err on the side of not merging two records that may represent different people than incorrectly merging two people who are different. As a result, if you've communicated with this person on multiple email addresses, it's possible that two records of them may exist in your contact list (one with more recent communications than the other).
To confirm this, use the Quick Search bar on "Your Contacts" to search for the person's name and see if there is more than one record. If you find more than one, you can merge them by clicking the checkboxes next to their pictures on each row, and clicking "Merge Contacts" in the bulk edit menu that appears at the top of the page.
