How to forward emails to your CRM as contacts

Plenty of the people you meet reach you by email first: an introduction from a friend, a reply with a full signature, a colleague's photo of a business card. Copying those details into a CRM by hand is slow, so they tend to wait. This guide shows how to turn each one into a contact by forwarding it to Shmor.

The contact goes to whichever CRM your Shmor account uses: ShmorCRM, the micro-CRM built into Shmor, or Attio or HubSpot.

What you need

• A Shmor account. Signing in with your email creates it and starts the free trial.
• The address you forward from must be your Shmor sign-in email, or another address you have confirmed (below).

That is all. There is no mailbox to connect and no forwarding rule to set up.

Step 1: forward the email

Forward the email to in@emails.useshmor.com from your sign-in address. Shmor knows it is you from the address you send from.

Shmor reads:

• the body, including the forwarded message and its signature;
• the subject line, when it says something useful;
• up to 5 attachments of up to 10 MB each: photos and screenshots (JPEG, PNG, WebP or GIF), one audio file, and .vcf contact cards. PDFs are not read yet.

Tiny images, such as logos in signatures, are skipped.

Step 2: add a line of context

Above the forwarded message, write what the email does not say: how you know them, what they want and when to follow up. For example:

Intro from Priya. Wants a demo in January, follow up after the holidays.

Shmor turns that into the note on the person, sets Met via (here, Intro) and Met at (who introduced you), and creates a follow-up task. If you do not give a date, it uses your default follow-up from Settings.

Step 3: read the reply

Shmor replies in the same thread, from the address you forwarded to, with a card listing what it saved and an Open the contact link. If it could not tell how you met or when to follow up, the email asks:

• How did you meet? Reply with Networking event, Conference, Intro, Inbound, Online or Other, or a few words such as "met at SaaStock London".
• Follow up? Reply with when and what about, such as "follow up in 5 days about the proposal", or "no follow-up".
• Possible deal? On Pro, reply "create a deal" to add one, or "not a deal".

Replies only need the new text. Shmor ignores the quoted thread below it.

Forwarding from more than one address

If you forward from a work and a personal address, add the second one on the Channels page, under Add another address you own. Shmor emails a confirmation link to it. Open the link while signed in to Shmor and press Confirm this address; the link works once, for 24 hours. You can add up to 5 extra addresses, and each address can belong to only one Shmor account.

If your email is not answered

The shared address only accepts mail that passes DMARC, the check that proves an email really came from the domain it claims.¹ That stops anyone sending captures in your name. Most business mailboxes pass. If yours does not, Shmor sends one notice a day to your account email, and you can forward to your private address instead: it is on the Channels page and does not require a DMARC pass, although mail that fails DMARC outright, or fails SPF without passing DKIM, is still dropped. If you ever share the private address by mistake, click Make a new private address; the old one stops at once.

Shmor also ignores, without a reply:

• mail from addresses that are not yours or not confirmed;
• automatic replies and bounces;
• more than 30 emails an hour or 200 a day from one address.

Email and Telegram together

Both channels write to the same CRM. Use Telegram when you are on your phone at an event, and email when the introduction is already in your inbox. See capturing conference contacts with Telegram.