Two Minute Tuesday: IMAP Email

Video Transcript

Welcome to another Two Minute Tuesday, Main Sequence’s series of short videos with tips, tricks, and tutorials to help make you a more powerful PCRecruiter user.

This week we’re going to talk about IMAP email accounts and how they interact with PCR. IMAP is one of the two most common methods of connecting to an email account, the other being POP, or “pop”.

POP stands for “post office protocol,” and it works very much like traditional post office box. Your email client, Microsoft Outlook for example, connects to your mailbox at your mail hosting provider, and downloads all of the contents, leaving the mailbox on the server empty. While this does afford local access to your emails when you’re not online, it means the mail is now stored only in the mail client you downloaded it to. If you check the same mailbox from your phone, it’ll be empty. Your Sent Items and other folders will also be only up to date on that one mail client.

With IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), however, the mail stays on the server. Your mail client simply displays and manipulates the messages where they are. This means you can connect to the same email account from multiple mail clients, all of which will stay in sync with each other because they’re all just reflecting what’s in the mail folders on the server. These days, with ubiquitous internet access, and the need to access the same email account via multiple computers or mobile devices, IMAP is the most common setup.

So, how does this work with PCRecruiter? Well, PCRecruiter has its own optional built-in email client. While all users have the option to send email out of PCRecruiter from various screens, the PCR Mail client lets you receive email in PCR as well. This can really shorten the process of creating Name records from or importing resumes from received emails, or quickly accessing the Name record when a contact emails you.

The other big advantage here is Activity tracking. Each time you send or receive a message from someone whose email address is on a record in the database, PCR can log the text of that email as an Activity on their record, and as long as the original email still exists on the server, you can jump right to it from the person’s name record. Having all of your email communication automatically logged as part of the Name record in PCR can be a powerful asset.

PCRecruiter’s IMAP synchronization runs 24 hours a day. So even if you never use the PCR Mail client at all, once the connection to your IMAP email account is set up, you can send and receive email on your mobile phone, in Outlook, or anywhere else, and the activity logs and emails will be accessible from within PCRecruiter. And, any emails you send out from PCRecruiter will be synced as sent items in all of your other email clients.

For more Two Minute Tuesdays, subscribe to this YouTube channel, follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, join the PCRecruiter LinkedIn users group, and watch our blog posts on your PCR login screen. If you have any topics or suggestions for future Two Minute Tuesdays, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.