Mail Sync

Rainbook Mail Sync puts every customer email and meeting on the right account and deal in Jira, so your whole team works from the same conversation.

Your whole team sees the whole conversation

Rainbook Mail Sync copies your team's email and meetings with customers into Jira. Each email thread becomes a Conversation work item and each customer meeting becomes a Meeting work item, linked to the account, contacts and deal they belong to.

Your whole team sees every customer email and meeting on the account and deal. A rep picking up an account reads the full history, an engineer on the delivery epic sees what was promised, and a manager reviewing a deal sees the latest reply without asking for a forward.

It follows the record. A Conversation takes the visibility of the records it is linked to. Email on a deal everyone in the CRM can see is visible to everyone in the CRM; email on a private deal is visible to that deal's people.
Private threads. Choose Make private on any thread, from the sidebar or with the Private toggle on the thread in Rainbook, and Jira shows it only to you and the people its Private security level allows. By default, that means the owner and members of rainbook-admins. The owner of the thread, or a Rainbook admin who can open it, can make it visible again.
Change it in one click. Anyone in the CRM who can open a thread can choose who sees it (only me, the deal team, everyone in the CRM, or everyone who can see the account), with Undo. Automatic puts it back on the record's rule.
Threads with no customer record yet wait in the Inbox under Unlinked threads, where you can link them to a record or discard them. Choose Create account and contact, Create contact at <Account> when the domain's Account exists, or Open lead when the person is an open Lead. They are normally visible to everyone in the CRM. On sites with Legal-pack walls or the Regulated pack, new threads stay Private to the mailbox owner until linked; shared mailboxes there keep the known-customer rule.
A domain two Accounts share. New email from a domain that more than one Account uses waits in the Inbox so someone can choose the Account. Adding a domain that another Account already uses doesn't move email that's already linked. Use Change link on the conversation.

On Jira Free, everyone on the site sees every record; private deals and private threads need Jira Standard or above.

Captured email is ordinary Jira work: you can search it, link it, report on it and keep it. Rainbook writes captured mail quietly, so capturing sends nobody a Jira notification.

Before you start

Mail Sync requires an active Rainbook subscription.

Install Rainbook Mail Sync for Jira from the Atlassian Marketplace on the site where Rainbook runs, then open Jira settings › Apps › Rainbook Mail Sync so it shows its Connect code. In Rainbook, open Settings › Mail, check it shows the same code, and press Connect. To pair with a string instead, press Use a pairing string instead (Pair Mail Sync until Mail Sync's page shows a code) and paste the string under Pair with Rainbook on the Mail Sync page.
Mailboxes belong to people who use Rainbook. Shared inboxes, such as sales@ or support@, can be added too.
On the free tier (Standard on sites of 1 to 10 users) you get the Gmail and Outlook sidebars; background capture, summaries and drafts need a paid plan. A site of 1 to 10 users on Advanced captures, and Mail Sync costs nothing on a site of that size.
Prices and trials are on Pricing and licensing.

Microsoft 365 users connect their own mailbox wherever their IT allows it, or IT connects everyone; Google Workspace capture is connected by the IT admin; capture is labelled beta; personal Gmail opens after Google's review, with a waitlist.

Connect Microsoft 365

You have two ways to connect, and you can use both on one site.

IT connects everyone (admin consent). A Microsoft 365 admin opens the Mail Sync admin page, clicks Connect Microsoft 365 and approves Rainbook Mail Sync once for the organisation. Then they pick the mailboxes Rainbook should read. Nobody else sees a consent screen and no PowerShell is needed. Rainbook reads only the mailboxes you choose.

If your security team wants Exchange itself to enforce that choice, the admin page has an optional Advanced: also enforce this in Exchange section with the exact steps and a Check enforcement button. Exchange can take up to 2 hours to apply role changes.

Each rep connects their own mailbox. Wherever your Microsoft 365 tenant lets people approve apps themselves, any CRM user can open their Rainbook Mail Sync personal settings, click Connect Microsoft 365 and start capturing straight away. If your tenant needs an admin to approve first, the page says so and gives you Copy a message for your admin with the approval link ready to send.

Rainbook asks Microsoft for read-only access to mail and calendars. It never sends, moves, deletes or changes anything in a mailbox or calendar.

Connect Google Workspace

Your Google Workspace admin chooses one of two setups. Both work today.

Domain-wide delegation. The admin copies Rainbook's client ID and scope list from the Mail Sync admin page into the Google Admin console (Security › Access and data control › API controls › Domain-wide delegation), clicks Verify in Rainbook, and picks the mailboxes to capture. People don't need to do anything.

Trusted app. The admin marks Rainbook as a trusted app in the Google Admin console (API controls › Manage third-party app access). Each person then clicks Connect Gmail in their Rainbook Mail Sync personal settings and approves access for their own mailbox. The admin page shows who has connected.

Rainbook asks Google for read-only access to Gmail and Calendar, and never sends, moves, labels or deletes your mail.

Personal Gmail and the waitlist

Personal Gmail accounts, and Workspace domains whose admin hasn't set up delegation or trust yet, open after Google completes its review of Rainbook's Gmail access. Until then, click Join the waitlist in your Rainbook Mail Sync personal settings. When it opens, waitlisted people get a notice in Rainbook and a Connect Gmail button with their address already filled in. You can leave the waitlist at any time.

In the meantime the Gmail sidebar works for everyone: see Sidebars.

Choose mailboxes and history

Admins pick mailboxes from your CRM users, from your Google Workspace directory, or by typing an address for a shared inbox. A site can capture up to 2,000 mailboxes.

When you add a mailbox, Rainbook brings in recent history first: the last 90 days by default, or 7, 30, 180 or 365 days if you prefer. This history includes only mail with known customers; threads your team starts with someone new are captured from then on. The newest mail lands first and the admin page shows progress for each mailbox. After that, Rainbook checks each mailbox every few minutes, and new customer mail appears on the record shortly after it arrives.

If you imported email history from your old CRM, Rainbook picks up where the import ended and adds new replies to the imported threads instead of creating copies. See Import.

What Rainbook captures

Conversations your team starts or joins. When someone on your team starts a thread with a person outside your company, or replies to one, Rainbook captures the thread, even when that person isn't in Rainbook yet. "Someone on the team wrote" means their own sent copy; forwarding mail to your own personal address does not count. When someone on the team replies, up to 6 earlier messages from the 30 days before come with it. On Microsoft 365, those earlier messages come from Inbox, Sent Items and Archive. A brand-new outbound email has no earlier messages. An inbound email from someone new that nobody on the team answers is not captured unless an admin turns on Capture all external email. A thread with someone new waits in Unlinked threads. Choose Create account and contact, Create contact at <Account> when the domain's Account exists, or Open lead when the person is an open Lead. Personal mail you send from your work mailbox is captured the same way; keep it out with your never-log list or the Rainbook/Don't log label (below).
Every email with a known customer. A message is captured when someone outside your company is on it and that person is a Contact or an open Lead in Rainbook, or writes from the web domain on one of your Accounts. Open Leads match by their email only, never by company domain. Rainbook matches up to 50,000 open Leads, newest first; Settings › Mail shows how many older ones are not matched. The thread is captured and offers Open lead. Replies by your team are captured with the rest of the thread.
One Conversation per thread. Captured messages in a thread land in one Conversation, even when the thread reaches several reps' mailboxes or crosses Gmail and Outlook.
Files from every sender. Attachments from customers and from your team, such as proposals, quotes and contracts, are attached to the Conversation. Rainbook skips email signature logos, small inline images, duplicates of a file already on the thread, and program files (for example .exe or .msi). An admin can choose Skip files your team sends if you prefer customer files only.
Inline images. Charts and screenshots pasted into an email are captured and shown in place.
Meetings. Calendar events with a known customer or open Lead become Meeting work items with the time, join link, location and agenda, and stay up to date when the event moves or is cancelled. Team-organised meetings with outside guests are also captured, even when the guests are not in Rainbook yet: meetings the mailbox owner organised, or a colleague organised and the owner accepted or tentatively accepted. An outsider's invite with no known party is not captured just because the owner accepted it. A meeting seen in several calendars is one Meeting. Meetings with up to 150 attendees are captured; 151 or more attendees and events you declined are skipped. An event you marked private in your calendar becomes a Meeting only you and the people Jira allows can open: by default, the owner and members of rainbook-admins. On Jira Free and for shared mailboxes, private events aren't captured.
Every outside email, when an admin wants it. An admin can turn on Capture all external email to also capture mail from people who aren't in Rainbook yet and that nobody on your team has answered, such as a first enquiry from a new buyer. It is off by default. Those threads wait in Unlinked threads, with the same choices to create records or open an existing Lead.

Files up to 10 MB are captured by default. An admin can set the limit anywhere from 1 MB to 25 MB (up to 10 MB on Jira Free). A larger file is listed on the message with "open in mailbox". Captured files count against your Jira site's storage, and on Jira Free the admin page shows how much of your 2 GB you have used.

Mail with more than 100 outside recipients is skipped unless a known party (a Contact, an Account's domain or an open Lead) is on the thread, or the thread is already being followed. Exactly 100 outside recipients is within the limit. Mailing-list headers still mark mail as bulk unless the sender is an exact Contact or open Lead. Internal-only mail and anything in Spam, Junk, Trash or Drafts is not captured automatically. To put an internal thread on a record, such as a customer escalation a colleague forwarded to you, choose the customer record in the Gmail or Outlook sidebar, then choose Log.

What Rainbook leaves out

You decide what stays out, at three levels:

Your own never-log list. Add addresses or whole domains in your Rainbook Mail Sync personal settings, such as your accountant or a personal contact. Mail with them is never captured.
Your team's blocked list. Admins keep site-wide Blocked addresses and Never-capture domains in Rainbook under Settings › Mail.
One message or thread. Label a message Rainbook/Don't log in Gmail, or categorise it Rainbook: Don't log in Outlook, and it is never captured. In the sidebar, Stop logging this thread stops capture of that thread from your mailbox, and Make private keeps a captured thread to you and the people its Private level allows: by default, the owner and members of rainbook-admins.

When someone discards an unlinked thread, its sender is added to the blocked list so the next email from them stays out too.

Before anything is written to Jira, Rainbook replaces payment card numbers and US Social Security numbers in the subject and text of every captured email, logged email and meeting. A card number becomes "[card ending 4242 removed]" and a Social Security number becomes "[SSN removed]". Everything else in the message is kept exactly as written, and order numbers that only look like card numbers are left alone. Attached files are stored as sent.

Masking is always on. Admins see the month's count in Settings › Privacy and data, under Masked numbers and file storage.

How Rainbook's AI uses your email

On paid plans, Rainbook reads captured email to write the record's summary, health reasons, next steps and reply drafts, so each person sees the account's story without reading every thread. Rovo can use those summaries when someone who can see the record asks and has agreed for their own mail, or an admin has allowed it; AI clients such as Claude or ChatGPT are coming soon and will follow the same rule. Each person sees exactly what Jira lets them see. Your email is never used to train AI models. More on AI and in the AI Usage Policy.

Pausing, disconnecting and uninstalling

Disconnect a mailbox or a whole connection at any time from the admin page or your personal settings. Rainbook deletes the access tokens and revokes Google access. Reconnecting later adds no duplicates.
If a subscription lapses, capture pauses and the connection shows "Paused: capture needs a paid plan". Connections are kept for 30 days, so capture picks up where it stopped when you renew. After 30 days the tokens are deleted.
Microsoft 365 admins who want to end organisation-wide consent also remove Rainbook Mail Sync from Enterprise applications in Microsoft Entra.
Captured email stays in Jira. Conversations, Meetings and their files are Jira work items, so they stay on your site even if you uninstall Rainbook Mail Sync or Rainbook. The Admin guide lists what you keep and what goes on uninstall.

Mail Sync, the sidebars and other capture paths

Can I use the sidebars and capture together? Yes, and they work best together. Capture brings in customer email on its own; the sidebar in Gmail or Outlook shows you the account while you read and lets you log, create and draft. Logging a message that capture already brought in doesn't make a copy: Rainbook just links the thread to the record you picked. See Sidebars.

What if the same email reaches several connected mailboxes? Rainbook writes each message once. A thread between a customer and three of your reps is one Conversation, and each message appears once, whichever mailboxes it reached.

My IT team already connected my mailbox. Do I need to connect it myself? No. Capture runs through one connection per mailbox, and an admin-connected mailbox is already captured. Your personal settings are still where you keep your never-log list and pair your sidebars.

My mailbox was connected both by IT and by me. Will I get duplicates? No. Every message is checked against everything Rainbook has already written before it is captured, so a message is never written twice.

We used Rainbook Beta. What happens to our capture? When you move to the listed apps, Rainbook picks up from where Rainbook Beta stopped, with no duplicate messages. Microsoft admin consent and Google delegation carry over; people who connected their own mailbox click Reconnect once.

Does Rainbook capture Slack, Teams chat or call recordings? No. Rainbook captures email and calendar meetings. Atlassian's own Jira apps for Slack and Microsoft Teams, and its Zoom and Gong connectors, bring those in, and Rainbook's Conversations and Meetings sit beside them on the account.