When you've enabled the Gmail/Outlook sync across users, a lot of customer-related emails will start flowing into Planhat, creating transparency around customers. Automatically, Planhat ensures we only sync emails related to customers, but sometimes you want to extend this filtering further. For example:

In Email Settings, you'll find a tab called Filtering (note: the email settings page is only accessible by Users with Admin Access workflow permission enabled). There are three sections to this: General Rules, Participant-specific rules, and Email-specific rules. This provides great flexibility in filtering out across multiple dimensions.

The General rules block out entire domains or emails

For example, in our own Planhat instance, we have listed @planhat.com as an internal domain, meaning that any email between Planhat colleagues are not synced, nor are any user events tracked. "Internal emails" follows a similar logic as internal domain, but for specific email addresses. This allows you to block specific addresses that don't share your domain, like external consultants.

📌 Remember to block out all your domains! So if you have @planhat.com and @planhat.co.uk, make sure both are set as internal domains.

The Participant-specific rules block out (or allow) specific parties

A. Emails stop list

Input

Planhat user or group of Planhat users and one or several end user(s). All to be selected from a defined list of available users and end user objects. The input selects the email address (and not the end user), meaning a shared email address will cover out all associated end users (e.g., in the case of support@planhat.com)

Outcome

Email is not synchronized if the user and at least one of the end users stop-listed are on the participation list of an email. It doesn’t matter if there are other end users or users in the same email - since that stop-listed person is blocked, the entire email will not be synchronized into Planhat. Emails can still be sent from Planhat to stop-listed users, but they won’t synchronize back from the “Sent” folder, i.e., not appear in conversations.

These emails can be back-synched for specific users by admins, up to a year back.

B. Emails white list

Input

Same input logic as for the emails stop list - Planhat user or group of Planhat users and one or several end user(s). All to be selected from a defined list of available users and end user objects.

Outcome

If a user exists in white-list, it will be synchronized only if the email object contains the listed end users, all other emails are ignored.

Other factors

Permissions: only modifiable by users with admin access.

Limits: a user could not be in both stop list and white list.

The Email-specific rules block out specific content

This uses the same mechanism as Planhat's filters: defining a set of criteria in an Any/All combination that filter out emails. If an email matches a specific filter, it will get completely blocked out from the sync.

Note that the keywords are not sensitive to upper or lower case letters (e.g., if the specified keyword is “hello” then email with keyword “Hello” would also be filtered)

📌 Important to note!

Be aware that keywords will follow throughout the thread. One example is if setting a filter for automatic calendar invites emails based on "Subject contains 'Invitation'" - now if someone replies to that calendar invite with "real content", that response will also be filtered out from Planhat.

👑 Pro-tips!