About Using Email in Actionstep

Modified on Fri, 31 Oct at 4:14 PM

In this article:

Email Setup
Email Views
Associating Emails with Matters
Email Integrations
Understanding Email Storage

Email in Actionstep is designed to help you manage emails for your different matters. It is not designed to have the same functionality as an email client like Outlook or Gmail. Because of this, there are several integration options for you to use to help manage your email communications.

There are numerous ways you can associate emails with matters in Actionstep, and there are various views that categorize the emails.

Email Setup

For more information on setting up email within your system, please see Setting Up Personal Email Mailboxes and Setting Up System Email Mailboxes.

Where You Can Access Email

Here are a few different places you can access your email options:

Comms Main Menu

Emails are grouped together into categorized list views similar to the image below. You can access this list by clicking Comms in the main menu bar.

Contact Card

When viewing a contact card, the Participant Email tab and menu provide options for composing emails as well as viewing different statuses of email communications.

Please note the following:

If you compose and send an email from this menu, the sent email will be recorded on the Participant Sent Items list. This will happen regardless of which email client you are using.
Emails the system generates are also recorded in the Sent Items list.
Only emails sent using Mailgun will be recorded under Inbox.

Matter

When viewing a matter, click the Comms menu icon. You can view emails associated with the matter from the matter's Inbox, Drafts, and Sent Items. From the page itself, you can Compose an email.

Associating Emails with Matters

There are various ways to associate emails with matters. To learn more about these methods, see Working with Emails In Actionstep.

Email Integrations

Actionstep offers an integration with Microsoft, which allows you to associate emails with matters from Outlook. See Setting Up the Outlook Add-in.

Actionstep also offers a Google add-on so you can assign emails with matters from Gmail. See Using the Gmail Add-on for more information.

NOTE: Currently, Actionstep does not support sending bulk emails; however, you can create a contact custom list view that will pull all of your client's emails into a list. You can export the contact list view as well. To learn more, see Using Custom List Views.

Understanding Email Storage

Depending on the mail services your firm uses, Actionstep stores either a full email message file, a JSON file containing email information, or a dynamic reference header that retrieves content from the mail server in your database.

With the reference header option, Actionstep does not store email files in the database, but instead displays email content in Actionstep by pulling (or referencing) the content from the third-party mail service (like Microsoft or Google). This means that when performing an Actionstep backup or export, email content may appear to be 'incomplete' due to this difference in storage locations. When this happens, it's recommended you either download the content from your relevant mail service, or re-assign the emails in your new system.

This setup should not present risks to statutory retention periods since the data is still within the control and access of the firm—just not within the Actionstep platform based on the above-mentioned integration and data storage methods.

Setting Up System Email Mailboxes