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Settings: Understand how missing sender/recipients are handled by CloudExtend (Optional)
Settings: Understand how missing sender/recipients are handled by CloudExtend (Optional)

GMNS | NetSuite requires that attached emails have a matching Sender and Recipient in NetSuite. Learn how this is addressed when empty

Updated over a week ago

There are different ways to handle the empty sender and recipient fields in NS. In this article, we will show you how to:


Because NetSuite requires that senders and recipients exist in NetSuite, CloudExtend can automatically create contact records when they are missing in order to ensure a successful save. This can result in a large number of unnecessary orphaned contacts therefore we have enabled 3 options for you.

Admins will have configured one of the three settings below during your implementation. If you need to track Last Sales Activity (LSA) we encourage you to use option 2.

  • Option 1 - Auto-create missing entities(the default behavior for customers that signed up prior to September 7, 2018.

  • Option 2 - Offer to select alternate entities or manually create contact prior to attaching - required if you are tracking Last Sales Activity (LSA)

  • Option 3 - Always use email ID (default for customers that signed up from September 7, 2018, onward)


Handling Missing Sender/Recipient

If your messages are on Autopilot the behavior is different than below. See this section for more info.

NetSuite requires that attached emails have a matching Sender and Recipient in NetSuite. These could be Employee or Contact records. Prior to September 2018, CloudExtend would automatically create missing contacts resulting in contacts with no company affiliation and often missing name information.  With the release of CloudExtend for Google Apps Bundle v2.6.0.x, Admins can now control the behavior org-wide via a setting in NetSuite available via Setup > Company > General Preferences > Custom Preferences as shown below. 

3 options to choose from when attaching emails to NetSuite

OPTION 1 (Default Setting for customers signing up prior to September 7, 2018)
Auto-create missing entities

When this setting is selected, CloudExtend will automatically create missing contacts for you.  This may result in contacts with no company affiliation and often missing name information. We recommend you consider option 2 or 3 as an alternative (because who wants a bunch of orphaned contacts).

OPTION 2 (recommended if you track Last Sales Activity)
Offer to select alternate entities or manually create contact prior to attaching

If a user tries to attach an email where the sender or recipient is NOT in NetSuite as either a contact or an employee, they will not be able to save the email and will be presented with an option to add the sender/recipient. At this point you have 2 options:

Step 1: Select an existing contact as the missing sender/recipient

Step 2: Create a new contact prior to attaching the email to NetSuite.

💡 Note the Last Sales Activity in NetSuite will be updated when the following conditions are met

  • The sender must be listed as a sales rep in their employee record.

  • Emails must be attached from the sent items folder or from compose mode (required by NetSuite to update LSA)

  • emails on Autopilot will not update the LSA

A short video and text explanation showing option 2 in more detail are below.

Text / graphical overview of option 2

If CloudExtend finds that the required sender and/or recipient entities are not in NetSuite users will be asked to select sender/recipient entities as shown below

Update steps to attach email with entity selection:

Step 1: Click on SELECT SENDER/RECIPIENT

Step 2 and 3: Select an existing sender/recipient entity to server as a surrogate OR create a new contact.

Step 4: Click CONTINUE to confirm selection.

Step 5: Select record type to attach to.

Step 6: Click SAVE EMAIL.

*The LSA field is only updated when emails attached are associated with a NetSuite entity (in this case employee) that is marked as a sales rep on the employee record. With option 2 enabled, the App is not checking for any entities and is simply dropping in the sender and recipient's email address therefore LSA is not updated.

With this setting enabled, when creating a native NetSuite message, CloudExtend will use sender/recipient email ID's instead of NetSuite entities. Admins should pick this setting when you are required to attach mails from users who are not always available as entities in NetSuite. Note, however, that the LSA field will not update with this option (use option 2 if you need to update the LSA field)

⚠️IMPORTANT

Users using option 3 are encouraged to set their view as shown in the following section to avoid any confusion.


Emails on Autopilot

Because emails on Autopilot are attached via a background process CloudExtend may not always have access to the same email details as if the user were manually attaching an email. The attach behavior varies depending on the record type the email was attached to.

When no matching NetSuite records are found

If no matching NetSuite records are found with the sender or recipient email (or they are inactive) then NetSuite defaults Sender/Recipient fields to the Admin that configured Autopilot (because their token/secret is used for logging in to NetSuite).

Attaching to entity records with Autopilot

If the message is attached to an entity record the following logic takes place to set the author and recipient fields.

  • The author field is set to the 1st record found when matching the following records with the sender's email.
    Below preference order is followed in case of multiple matches.
    Employee > Contact > Customer > Vendor > Partner >Job

  • The recipient is set as the entity the message is attached to.

Attaching to activity or transaction records with Autopilot

If the message is attached to an activity or a transaction the following logic takes place to set the author and recipient fields.

  • The author field is set to the 1st record found when matching the following records with the sender's email.

    Below preference order is followed in case of multiple matches.
    Employee > Contact > Customer > Vendor > Partner >Job

  • The recipient field is set to the 1st record found when matching the following records with the recipient's email. In the case of multiple recipients, autopilot uses the first recipient returned by Gmail API for record search.
    Below preference order is followed in case of multiple matches.
    Employee > Contact > Customer > Vendor > Partner >Job


Other use cases for using select sender/recipient

Selecting Sender/Recipient when CloudExtend cannot create a message record.

This happens when the email id of the sender/recipient is more than 64 characters and in such cases, CloudExtend will show the panel where the user can select the required entities and proceed with mail attachment.

This is typical with an email Id automatically created by NetSuite where the email address can be a very long string.

Manually triggering the selection panel:

Users can also manually trigger the panel, in case they want to choose a different sender/recipient when attaching the mail, by clicking on the icon as shown below


View Tips

The default view of the message record does not show the Author's email. Customize your default view and add author email. This will then allow you to see the actual email of the missing entity.

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