Email syncing options

While 4Degrees is most powerful (and creates the most efficiency gains for you) when email sync is fully enabled, we recognize that each team has different norms around what is allowed or useful to capture in our system.  As a result, we give teams a number of different options to control what interactions get synced and in what circumstances.

This article covers the options for what email and calendar interactions get synced into 4Degrees.  Outside of what is synced into 4Degrees, you also have options to choose how much of those interactions are shared with your teammates in 4Degrees - the options available for that are covered here.

1. Full sync

This is the default deployment in 4Degrees and is recommended in most cases.  In this case, we create a contact record for each person you and your team have exchanged emails with or been in a meeting with, and attach each interaction itself (email content, meeting invite) to the contact's interaction log.  This option gives you maximum recall around historical interactions and relationships (and enables our product to perform some of our advanced analytics).

2. Full sync, with specific domains blocked

In this case, you can prevent emails and calendar invites sent or received from contacts with a specific email domain (e.g., pitchbook.com) from entering into the 4Degrees system.  For example, if you wanted to prevent internal emails that have been exchanged from showing up in 4Degrees, you could include your organization's domain on a Block list.  Instructions on how to enable domain blocking can be found here.

3. Full sync, but with contacts queued before addition

With this option, we automatically sync all interactions with existing contacts, but only add new contacts to your team's relationship network (from your interactions) with explicit approval from you.  This is best for teams who want to be selective about which contacts show up in 4Degrees, to enable an easier organization and filtering experience (and are willing to trade off some manual review time to accomplish this). 

To enable this, reach out to us and we'll toggle this on our end for you!

4. Metadata-only sync

With this enabled, instead of having access to the body of any synced email or calendar invite within 4Degrees, we only capture the "To",  "From" and the "Subject" lines of the interaction, along with when the interaction occurred.  This enables you to still have a history of your prior interactions but removes the context from our system entirely, and also reduces the amount of information that teams need to parse through to find specific notes they may be looking for.  This option also limits some of our relationship intelligence capabilities.  

To enable this for your team, click "Team Settings" (after clicking the gear icon in the top right-hand corner of 4Degrees), select "Email settings", and toggle off the "Import email bodies" option.

5. Gmail extension + Outlook add-in driven

In cases where your team feels uncomfortable with emails being automatically synced at all (or would rather pick specific interactions to bring into 4Degrees to avoid noise entering the system), you can also use our email extensions / add-ins to pick specific emails (and email content) that you would like to have included in 4Degrees, and add them to the relevant contact, deal, or company with a click.  This is the most manual of the options listed and prevents us from automatically creating contacts / keeping the relationship network of the firm up to date on your behalf.  However, this option also provides maximum control and ensures that each interaction logged is one that is valuable and should be included.

These options can often be used in combination.  For example - you could combine the metadata-only sync, with adding the text of specific email interactions into 4Degrees using our Gmail extension / Outlook add-in.  Or you could have a full sync that both uses domain blocking and queues new contacts for approval.