Seeking Advice on Building an Integrated Email Management System with Airtable, Make.com, and IMAP

Hmm, if it helps, the last time I did this I stored the thread ID with the email record, and then just used said thread ID with the "Reply to Email" action on Zapier so that the email was threaded and that worked fine.  I'm sure there's an equivalent action on Make that'll work for you

I couldn't find a good way to include the previous messages in the thread with the replied email though which was a bummer

It sounds like a really cool project though and I hope it goes really well!

Thanks for the tip, Adam! I’ll look for a similar "Reply to Email" action in Make. It’s a bummer about the previous messages, but I’m on the lookout for a fix. Appreciate your encouragement and insight!

Hi @tnw ,

The IMAP protocol contains the Thread ID, which is how you can link multiple email replies together.

If you want to include all of the previous replies in your reply, you could always use Make’s text aggregator (or other aggregators) to aggregate previous messages and put them at the bottom of your new message.

With some advanced Make workflows, you could probably even get it to look similar to how an email program natively makes it look with multiple levels of quoting.

None of these advanced workflows can be done with Zapier, so it’s fantastic that you standardized on Make for your company.

p.s. I am the top Airtable & Make consultant in the community. If your company has a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld 

Hey Scott,

Thanks a ton for your valuable advice, especially about leveraging the IMAP protocol's Thread ID for connecting email threads. The idea of using Make's text aggregator to compile previous messages is brilliant.

I'm curious about integrating these advanced workflows directly within the Airtable interface. Is it feasible to manage the entire process within Airtable, or might I need to use a 'mailto' link, potentially moving the email sending process to another platform?

Appreciate your insights and glad to hear Make offers more flexibility for this kind of task compared to Zapier. Just wondering if Airtable can keep up with these advanced processes or if some steps will have to happen outside of it.

Thanks again for shedding light on this!

No, you would not be able to do any of these things with a "mailto" link. Mailto links have tons of limitations, including a strict limit on how many characters they can have.

But yes, you can do everything you want to do from within Airtable's interfaces, because you would just trigger your Make automations natively from within Airtable.

I demonstrate how to do this on a much simpler level with basic text messaging on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes (link 1 and link 2), but it would be a similar process for emails.

I've also written an entire post about Make vs. Zapier here. 

Thanks Scott, i'll take a good look and if i don't find a viable solution maybe we can book a call.

Great! Also, here’s a thread on instantly triggering a Make automation from Airtable.

Hi Scott, been delving into this. would you advise using sendgrid/mailgun connection with a button as a easy swift solution ? 

Also watched the video on the simpletexting platform... if only it was simplemail. LOL. Taking a look at some webhook options this afternoon too!

I would not recommend SendGrid, but those platforms are for sending bulk emails. I thought you were sending individual emails, in which case you would use your normal email service. 

So as mentioned in the original post we run a cold email agency so we deal with lots and lots of volume so this solution would need to be able to handle lots of volume, each reply is custom. 

For bulk email sending, some popular options are:

MailGun, MessageBird, BigMailer, MailerLite, MailerSend, PostMark, BeeFree, and Mandrill (now known as MailChimp Transactional Emails).

As mentioned above, I would not recommend SendGrid.

All of these email services can be very easily automated with Make and integrated with Airtable. 

Always feel free to reach out if your company has a budget to work with an expert in this realm!

Airtable Consulting — ScottWorld

Hi Scott, 

sorry i didn't make this clear at all my mistake. we send all the initial outbound emails from our vps server that we have, we just want to use airtable as a response system, we have looked having front as a software as its similar to a master inbox we could then use airtable as more of just a crm and tag leads allowing them to arrive in the crm within airtable. lots of options just not enough knowledge in what's possible...

Ah, very cool! I'm sure that we can setup all of these things for you in Airtable, but yes, Front is another great app that several of my clients are using! Ironically, this would probably be overkill, but Front can ALSO be integrated with Airtable — by using Make's Front integrations. Lol!

Ah, I would be cautious about adding the text of the previous emails like that

You know how your email client hides previous messages in the thread, and when you show that stuff it's properly formatted and indented so that everything looks neat?  The clients themselves are pretty finicky and you may end up with a situation where your reply email just looks kind of fake because none of that stuff's happening and it just looks like one long email with all your previous messages in a single message. (Not sure if that's a concern for you but for my use case the emails looking spammy / fake was a dealbreaker)

I managed to get it to work on Gmail and Apple Mail (sorta), but gave up soon after because I was like "Ah, I'm going to have to do this for EVERY CLIENT" and just sighed and realized it's not feasible.  I would do some really basic tests before putting too much time into it if it's a concern

I'm still hoping I was doing something terribly wrong and am missing something that could make the whole thing simpler; fingers crossed!