Email to Actions: Examples & FAQ

• Example: Auto Populating Recipients Successfully
• Example: Auto Populating Recipients Unsuccessfully
• Using the Bcc Address: Do's & Don'ts
• Auto Populating Colleagues as Attendees
• FAQ
• FAQ 1-Pager

Example: Auto Populating Recipients Successfully

We always recommend leveraging the 'Link To' portion of an Action to associate the activity with a relevant policy document, stakeholder, or committee that was discussed.  When using Email to Actions, Link To can be auto-populated to associate the Action with the recipient in FiscalNote.

In order for the email recipient contact matching to work flawlessly, you’ll want to save these stakeholders in both: 1) your email address book; and, 2) your FiscalNote Directory. This ensures the full name of your email recipients displays correctly when crafting your email, as seen below, and that FiscalNote will be able to correctly lookup the name and link them to the Action:

That contact should also be searchable by the same name in the Directory.  This includes both Custom Contacts and those provided by FiscalNote already.  If you're not sure, head to the Directory and search for your contact:

Important to note: If your contact has a different name in both locations, the Email to Actions sync will not be able to recognize the match.

When using Email to Actions and the contact is recognized by both systems -- your inbox & FiscalNote -- the individual will be listed for you in the Link-To section after a successful send.  A confirmation email will display the name under LINKED ITEMS:

Example: Auto Populating Recipients Unsuccessfully

Even if your contact exists in the FiscalNote Directory, they will not be added to the Link-To section of an Action if:

1. They are not saved as a contact in your email address book
2. The name saved in both address books is different

The quickest way to test is to attempt to craft the email.  When entering their email address, do they appear as a name, or an email address?  The difference looks like the following:

An unsuccessful attempt at pre-populating the Link-To field will not produce an Error message.  It will treat the email as an Action created for a contact that has yet to be added to FiscalNote. 

If it did not work, the email sender will still be listed as an Attendee in the confirmation email.  However, the LINKED ITEMS field will not include the email recipient:

Using the Bcc Address: Do's & Don'ts

For Email to Actions to work properly, actions@sync.fiscalnote.com MUST be included in the Bcc line.
Common errors include: accidentally adding the address in the Cc line rather than Bcc, misspelling the email address, or placing the @ symbol between the wrong words. 

Always review your recipients list and ensure that actions@sync.fiscalnote.com is spelled correctly in the BCC line:  

Auto Populating Colleagues as Attendees

Attendees of an Action are always you and your peers who use FiscalNote.  'Attendees' is intended to be treated as the group of internal colleagues who participated in the activity with you.  Thus, as both a FiscalNote user and the email sender, you will always be listed as an attendee when using Email to Actions. 

To include your colleagues, add them as a recipient.  We recommend using the Cc option:

In the Success email notification, you should receive confirmation of Attendees listed in the Action in FiscalNote.  Those individuals will now be included in the Action as an Attendee in FiscalNote:

FAQ

Q: Can I send emails with only a subject (and no message)?
A: Yes.

An Action will get created with an Action Title from the email subject, and the Action Summary field will only contain the From, Subject, Date, To, and CC information from the email.

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Q: Who is the owner of the automatically created Actions?
A: The FiscalNote User who sent the email.

Email-to-Actions uses the sender's email address to identify the user, and automatically saves the Action under their FiscalNote account.

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Q: Can I send emails with images and hyperlinks in them?
A: Yes; but they will be simplified into plain text.

Actions do not currently support any rich text or HTML formatting. Email-to-Actions will do its best to  scrub away any HTML formatting from images and links, but it will not be perfect.

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Q: If I email someone who is not in the Directory, will a new contact be created?
A: No.

No, a new contact would not be automatically created with the Action. This is something that is slated for future Actions improvements.

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Q: Can I go back and edit an Action that was created by email?
A: Yes.

All Actions are editable, whether created in the app or created via email.

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Q: Can an Action logged via email be automatically logged to a certain Issue folder?
A: No.

You will need to go back into the app to assign the Action to an Issue.

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Q: Can an Action logged via email be automatically tagged with a Label or #hashtag?
A: No.

You will need to go back into the app to assign Labels or #hashtags.

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Q: If I email a non-FiscalNote user, will their contact be tagged to the Action?
A: Possibly.

Any non-FN users will ‘link to’ the Action IF they exist as a contact in the Directory. If the contact is not in the Directory, their contact will not be linked to the Action.

FAQ 1-Pager (Click here to download)