Email integration is an essential part of using Trail effectively. Once connected, Trail automatically saves copies of your client email communications into their profiles — making record-keeping, compliance, and client management much easier.
In this article you will learn:
How Trail's Email Integration works
Best Practice
Benefits
No Email Integration?
Next Steps
- How to Connect your Email Integration (links)
- Common FAQs
How Trail's Email Integration Works
Trail's email integration essentially allows us to send out emails using your email address and also access your mailbox to scan, take a copy and place a copy of client emails in Trail.
What Happens When You First Connect Your Email
💡 How this Works 💡
When you first connect your email address to Trail's email integration, Trail will do a "7-year record" scan of historic emails.
This means we will pick up any client emails you've had in the past 7 years (for record keeping requirements) and assign them to the relevant client profiles (more on this below). Depending on the size of your mailbox & emails, and the complexity of your mail server, this process may take a long time. However, once it has completed, all your 7-year historic emails will be showing in Trail.
This scanner runs along our usual 24-48 hours scanner of new emails which is explained below.
Assigning Client Emails to Profiles
💡 How this Works 💡
Trail scans your email inbox every 45 minutes or so, and it looks for new emails. During this scan, we will put a copy of the email (including text and attachments) into Trail's Mailbox page.
Trail assigns emails to profiles by matching email addresses with actively linked contacts.
✔ Emails are matched only if:
The contact’s email is marked as:
Participant
Non-Dependent
Dependent
The email address is actively linked (shown by a blue link icon in the profile)
If no match is found, the email will still appear in Trail’s Mailbox but won’t be assigned to a specific profile.
Sending out Emails using your Email Address
💡 How this Works 💡
If Email Integration is active:
You send an email from Trail
Trail forwards the email to your email provider (Microsoft or Google)
Your email provider sends it to the client
📩 Result:
To your client, the email appears as though it was sent directly from your own email address.
Before sending, Trail allows you to:
Edit the email content
Add CC or BCC recipients
Attach files
Best Practice Recommendations
✅ Do not delete client emails
Instead:
Archive them, or
Allow Trail to file them automatically
Deleting emails may prevent Trail from capturing them for compliance records.
Benefits of Using Email Integration
Connecting your email to Trail allows you to:
🚀 Email clients directly from Trail using your own email address
📘 Automatically save sent and received emails to client profiles
🕒 Reduce manual record-keeping
📂 Keep a complete communication history for compliance
What Happens If Email Integration Is Not Connected?
If Email Integration is not connected:
Emails sent from Trail will come from:
Your company email address (if Organisation Email Integration is set up), or
adviser@gettrail.com (if no organisation integration exists)
Replies from clients will still go to your inbox
Emails will NOT be automatically saved to client profiles
What if I want to disconnect my email and stop the syncing?
In order to disconnect your email address from Trail, you need to navigate to your Settings page, go to Email Integration (where you connected your email initially), and there will be a "Disconnect" button below your email address.
When you disconnect your email, it will immediately stop syncing all emails to Trail from that point onward.
Your historical emails will be kept, in order to comply with your record keeping obligations.
Next Steps
Connecting your Email Integration
There are specific instructions depending on your email provider; we currently support Google/ Gmail and Microsoft Office/ Outlook.
Please click the relevant link below for a step-by-step guide for integrating your email:
Email integration can occur on both a personal and organisational level. To find out more about how to do this on a organisation level here.