Navigation doesn't work after trashing/archiving an email

[SoBeGuy]

OK, as usual, thank you for the detailed and thoughtful reply. I apologize for my use of "modern standards". You're right that it's not valid to compare a team collaboration app with a CRM. My frustration is that I'm trying to migrate our team away from Missive, which is a collaborative email app into Espo, in which email is only one of many components. The benefit of Missive is its speed and efficiency of handling emails. When an email comes in, it shows up in the team inbox. As soon as someone starts replying to it, all other team members can see that person typing the response in real time and they can simultaneously add comments to the stream. Email threads can also be snoozed until a future date, at which point they resurface in the inbox. This is what I meant about treating emails as tasks. They're not literally tasks, but they function like tasks in the sense that they automatically reappear in the inbox. In many cases, it's faster to simply snooze an email, rather than having to create a separate task. The email thread already contains all the information, so when it reappears, you know what needs to be done, without having to manually create a task based on the same information.

Nevertheless, it's good to know that tasks are linked to emails. Since it adds the link to the comments field, I assumed it wasn't linked internally. However, I'm wondering why you chose to add the link to the comments field, rather than linking it in the sidebar like any other relationship. Adding the link to the comments field can be problematic because the field is user-editable and someone could inadvertently remove or mess up the link. I also noticed that the email field doesn't appear in any of the layout options for tasks. I think it would be better to offer both options for linking emails. In my case, I would disable adding the link to the comments field and only add it to the sidebar.

Beyond this, it would be great if Espo supported a threaded email view, even if it's not integrated with the stream. And I'd love for websocket to support presence and typing indicators.

[yuri]

It won't be removed as it were there from early days.

"Modern standards" it's a moot point. And it feels harsh for me to read. I'd avoid referring features/approaches as modern or non-modern, and right or wrong. It's manipulative. We should not compare CRMs/ERPs with Inbox/Chat Apps. The latter are built around emails/messages. The former have different purposes. I could not find information about the paradigm shift into treating emails as tasks.

One may also say that treating Emails as Tasks is not the best way. It has drawbacks:

• A topic is often scattered across multiple emails.
• Email does not have Due Date, reminders, not visible on Calendar.
• A user gets an additional task-like entity instead of having only a Task entity.

In the case of using Threads, an Email becomes not a first-class too. The Thread is a first-class. The same as the Case is a first class for support teams, the Opportunity/Lead for sales teams.

As I mentioned before, instead of investing into becoming an advanced chat/mail app, we'd rather improve our current Stream feature. Improve what already is there. We are CRM first, and partially in the ERP zone. Using entities like Case, Lead and Opportunity is the way to go.

When creating a Task from an Email, it actually links them internally. There's one-to-many relationship between them. You can see all related Tasks from an Email and whether they are completed. It's also possible to add the Tasks field to the Email's list view layout and see whether a task is completed w/o opening the email.

Regarding Parent. Meeting/Call/Task/Email are secondary objects. Account/Contact/Lead/Opportunity/Case are primary. Email should not be a parent of something. It's how the system was designed. But you can easily customize it so that an Email will be a Parent of a created Task.

In Espo, an Email has Assigned User, Teams, optional Stream, it is customizable with custom fields, can be automated with scripting tool and Workflows. It's quite a lot for an Email entity.

[SoBeGuy]

Well, it's a pretty important feature, so I hope you don't remove it. When you have a team of users sharing an inbox, users need to be able to assign emails to one another. For example, if a particular team member has been working with a customer, other team members may want to assign emails from that customer to that team member. Or certain team members may have expertise in dealing with certain subjects. In this case, a team member was unable to handle an issue, so she escalated it to me, which is another common use case.

While it's great that Espo has email integrated into the CRM, I feel like it's not up to modern standards in terms of treating email as a first-class entity, equivalent to tasks. In the traditional paradigm, email was considered a means of communication, not independently actionable. In the modern paradigm, we have apps like Missive, Front and many others that treat emails as tasks. When a customer emails a request, it's often more efficient to treat the email as actionable and assign it to a user, rather than having to create a separate task. Moreover, when you create a task from an email, instead of making the email the parent object, Espo inserts a manual link back to the email in the notes. This seems like a workaround and an example of what I mean about email not being a first-class entity.

In Missive, emails are organized in threads and team members can add inline comments within each thread, tagging other users to bring them into the conversation. It's similar to how streams work in Espo, except the email conversation is part of the stream. Thus, team members can chat privately to comment on the email thread and discuss how to respond. You could sort of simulate this in Espo by adding a stream to email, but it wouldn't really work since Espo treats each email as independent, rather than part of a thread. Adding support for email threads and associating the stream with a thread, rather than individual emails, would go a long way toward making Espo more productive in terms of how it handles email.

I apologize for the long digression. I know it's unrelated to the technical issue, but when you mentioned that it's not even supposed to support assigning emails, I felt that it warranted a more general response.

[yuri]

Maybe someone else experienced the same problem and could chime in.

The ability to assign emails is kind of atavism. It was not supposed to be there.

[yuri]

I tried to assign an email by a regular user to an admin user. The admin user appeared in the Users. Before assignment, it was not there.

[SoBeGuy]

From my admin account, I can assign an email to a user and that user shows up in the email's View Users screen. When I login as a regular user and try to assign an email to my admin account, the assignment works but I don't show up in the list of users. Also, I don't receive any notification of the assignment. Therefore, this seems to be a permissions issue. My regular users have Assignment Permission = ALL. So even though the user can successfully assign me an email, something is preventing them from linking the email to me.

[yuri]

Is the problem reproducible for you? If you assign another email to somebody.

[SoBeGuy]

Yes, it was assigned using that field.

[yuri]

How exactly it was assigned? Do you have the "Assigned User" field in the side panel in Emails?

[SoBeGuy]

Well, the email was assigned to me but it didn't go to my inbox. I had to find it by filtering the All box by emails assigned to me. Also, when I view the Users list for the email, I'm not listed as one of the users.

[yuri]

> Perhaps when an email is assigned to a user

It should already work that way. Just tested.

[SoBeGuy]

I understand, but is there a way for a user to add the email to the inbox of another user? Perhaps when an email is assigned to a user, it could automatically be added to their inbox?

[yuri]

> A user assigned an email to me

There's no email assignment feature out of the box.

EDIT. Actually, we have Assigned User (hidden by default) which I forgot about.

It's possible to Archive only emails related to the user through the "users" relationship. Such emails are considered as located in the user's Inbox. It's how it has been working with Trash and other folder. It's not an issue.

> As you can see in the first screenshot, when I view the email in the list view, I'm able to archive it by selecting its checkbox and then selecting Archive from the action menu.

Archive as a mass action is available when the All folder is selected. But it will have effect only for emails that are in the user's Inbox. The issue that it can appear like it was moved what needs to be fixed. Or maybe, we'd better remove Archive and Trash action when All is selected for simplicity.

On the screenshot you can see "View Users" action. It will show all users who have this email in their Inbox. You can check whether your User is in the list.

Treat the "All" folder as the ability to see Inboxes of other users. You cannot move emails of other users to your folder unless an email became yours.

[SoBeGuy]

I discovered a few more issues related to archiving.

A user assigned an email to me, which appeared in my All folder.

1. As you can see in the first screenshot, when I view the email in the list view, I'm able to archive it by selecting its checkbox and then selecting Archive from the action menu.
   
2. In the second screenshot, you can see there's no Archive option in the dropdown selector. I'd like to be able to archive individual emails from this menu in the list view.
   
3. The third screenshot shows that when the email is open in the main view, there's no option to archive it.
   

[yuri]

Found a solution. Tricky one. https://github.com/espocrm/espocrm/issues/3166