PostieDay 58 · 27 October 2026
Chapter 2 · 13 days to the chapter deadline
- The Universe Works in Mysterious Ways
I had an experience today that completely knocked me for 6. Talking with a client today I was asked if they could integrate their business emails with their CRM. So they could have a record of what emails were sent and crucially if anything was responded to. Perfect. Except they actually use IONOS forwarded to personal gmail accounts (mostly for the spam management and familiarity).
Key problem here is the personal Gmail accounts considering they wanted to log these separate accounts. Now this is possible with google script but it's a ball ache (technical term) syncing this between 10 separate accounts...
You'd think this would be the perfect time to introduce postie and while it is actually my plan for them to be my first customers I don't think Postie is at a state for them to actually move over. This is the same people that had the issues with the full mailboxes... 10 full use accounts and about 50 other shared inboxes... Yes "trial by fire" is all fine and good but given the choice I would rather not jump head first into the deep end to sink or swim...
What I realised is probably the easist and quickest way is to use Cloudflare Email Routing to an email worker (and create them a new email per person) and then display it in the CRM where they can use their transactional email service as they do normally. Since things are already forwarded from their IONOS email that they don't directly use anyway it makes the most sense...
bob@company.co.uk -> bob.company@gmail.com turns into bob@company.com -> bob@companycrm.com -> CRMAdmittedly they've had massive problems recently with the amount of personal gmail accounts they've been creating so this should actually help. For now keep the forward to gmail more so as a backup and just move them to answering email from their CRM (since they do most of their work there anyway). It's all about keeping a log for metrics and stuff and having less reliance on personal gmail forwards and setup as they expand.
I'll have to build some front end and some simple spam protection but that's going to be the easy part. The longest and most time consuming part in any new system is testing and response. It's all part of the game though.