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The Microsoft Exchange integration ingests each connected user’s mail, calendar events, and contacts into Metal so they show up alongside the rest of your firm’s context. It also enables the same live mailbox tools as the Outlook connection in chat.

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Connect your mailbox

Like the Outlook connection, Exchange is a per-user connection. You connect your own mailbox from Settings → Connections, with no separate admin step. Admins can also migrate existing Outlook users to Exchange.
1

Open Connections

Go to Settings → Connections → Microsoft Exchange.
2

Add a connection

Click Add Microsoft Exchange Connection, then Connect, and complete the Microsoft sign-in. When you’re back in Metal, the page shows your name and email with a Connected badge.
Your initial mail, calendar, and contacts import may take some time. After that, Metal checks for new and changed items approximately every five minutes.

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When Metal can’t read your mailbox

The Connected badge means Metal isn’t reporting a mailbox-read problem; it is not only a sign that the connection exists. If a permission, licensing, admin-approval, or sign-in problem stops reads, the Exchange page shows a Needs attention badge and the alert Metal can’t read your mailbox, with the next step to take: Reconnect appears only when reconnecting fixes the problem. In Settings → Connections, the Exchange row also shows Needs attention, with a Fix button when reconnecting helps, or Review when someone else must act, such as your Microsoft administrator. If Metal hasn’t confirmed that it can read your mailbox yet, the badge stays Connected with the note “Mailbox access not confirmed yet.” The status updates after the next sync.

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Sync windows

By default, Metal imports:
  • Email from the last 30 days.
  • Calendar events from the last 30 days through the next 365 days.
  • Contacts from the connected mailbox’s contacts. Contacts do not use a date-based lookback or lookahead window.
If your firm needs a different email or calendar range, contact your Metal team. To remove your mailbox, click Disconnect on the same page.

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What Metal stores

Connected Exchange mail becomes Email activities. Most calendar events become Meeting activities. Meeting invite, attendee response, and cancellation emails — and cancelled calendar events — are calendar bookkeeping, so they are not shown as meetings. Exchange contacts become people records in Metal when they have a first and last name and an email address outside your organization. For each email, Metal keeps the message’s own text, not quoted reply history from earlier messages in the thread. Bodies are subject to size limits; when a body is empty or too large, Metal still saves the activity but the text is not searchable. Metal does not automatically download or save file attachments from mailbox messages as documents. Instead, Metal records the file name, type, and size of each document attached to an ingested email. Metal records these attachment types:
  • PDF
  • Word (DOCX)
  • Excel (XLSX)
  • PowerPoint (PPTX)
  • Outlook message (MSG)
Metal skips inline images and all other file types. Metal records attachment details when it first ingests an email, so emails ingested earlier do not gain attachment details. When chat reads an email activity, it can see which documents were attached to that email. When chat lists activities, it flags the emails that have attachments. For example, you can ask chat “What files were attached to the last email from Acme Industrials?” To import a recorded attachment, see Import an email attachment. To get other files into Metal, upload them or connect file storage. Some workflows also accept attachments when you send mail to that workflow’s inbound address — see Email files into a workflow. You cannot edit the notes on mailbox activities. To edit notes on other activities, see Edit activity notes.
Exchange and Outlook are different connection options. Both enable live mailbox tools in chat. Exchange also persists mail, calendar events, and contacts for each connected user so that information becomes part of your firm’s context. See What Metal stores for how mail, calendar, and contacts are saved.

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Import an email attachment

You can import a recorded attachment into Metal as a document when you need its contents. Metal downloads the file from the mailbox, extracts its text, and links the document to the email activity. The imported document has the same access as the email activity.
  1. Open the email activity.
  2. Click the paperclip button. The number next to it is the count of recorded attachments.
  3. Find the file in the Attachments list and click Import File.
  4. In the Import this file? dialog, click Import File.
While Metal processes the file, the row shows its status. When processing finishes, click Open to view the document or Download to save the file. Files you have not imported show Not processed. Importing the same attachment again returns the existing document. Workflows can also import email attachments. A workflow’s agent or a workflow tool step can import an attachment from an email activity on behalf of the user running the workflow. Chat outside of workflows can list attachments but cannot import them. Ingested Exchange emails and calendar events become activities in Metal. Metal then relates each activity to records it already knows about:
  • People — participants whose address matches a person in Metal.
  • Limited partners — including prospective investors stored as LP records — when a participant is a primary or consultant contact on the LP, or when a participant’s email domain matches the LP’s website.
  • Fundraising processes — when the activity matches the process’s limited partner or source contact.
  • Funds — through a linked fundraising process. A fund is related when one of its processes is.
If Metal cannot match the activity to any records, it stays unlinked and does not update Last Activity on a limited partner or fundraising process. Metal retries matching as people are added or imported, so mail that was previously unlinked can gain links later. See Investor relations. Metal relates ingested emails and meetings to a company when a participant’s person record already has a company, when a participant’s company name matches one company’s name exactly, or when a participant’s email domain uniquely matches one company’s website domain. For meetings, Metal checks the external organizer and attendees. Metal skips internal people and your organization’s own domains, so internal meetings get no company links. Free-mail domains are skipped for the domain match, but a participant whose person record already has a company still links that company. Linked meetings appear in the company’s activity and update its Last Activity. If an attendee is removed from a meeting, Metal removes the company link it added for that attendee. Company links that users added by hand stay. Meeting company links apply to new and updated meetings. Older meetings gain links over time, when they are next updated or re-linked. Metal runs a bounded re-link pass on Exchange emails and meetings every five minutes. When a person’s company or a company’s website domain changes, Metal updates company links on the affected activities over successive passes, so a large backlog can take longer to converge. You don’t need to reconnect or re-sync. Metal does not automatically relate emails or meetings to deals.

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Company email touchpoints

Metal classifies each ingested Exchange email by direction:
  • Outbound — the sender’s address is on one of your organization’s email domains, or the message is in a connected user’s Sent Items.
  • Inbound — a directional touchpoint from a participant outside your organization, in a connected user’s Inbox. An inbound count is not a confirmed reply to outreach.
  • Not counted — internal mail between members of your organization, emails without a sender, emails whose mailbox copies were all removed or disconnected, and emails stored only outside Inbox and Sent Items.
Direction depends on your organization’s own email domains being configured correctly. Until a domain is configured, direction can be wrong in both ways: a Sent Items copy from that domain still counts as outbound through the folder fallback, while a colleague on the missing domain can be counted as inbound. Use chat to see how often your firm emails a company. Ask something like “How many emails did we send to and receive from Acme this quarter?” Chat reports, for each company, the outbound and inbound email counts and the latest outbound and inbound dates. You can ask about a date range of up to 365 days. The chat tool is not available in a conversation that is in strict mode or scoped to specific companies. Touchpoints are aggregate numbers only:
  • They cover your whole organization, including emails you can’t open yourself.
  • They never include subjects, bodies, or email addresses.
  • They can lag by up to about an hour because Metal caches results.
Developers can fetch the same counts with Aggregate company email touchpoints.

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Migrate Outlook users to Exchange (admin)

Admins and power users can move users who already have an Outlook connection to persisted Exchange ingestion. Migrated users do not need to reconnect. Use this when your firm’s users connected Outlook and you want their mailbox data stored in Metal without asking each user to add a Microsoft Exchange connection.
1

Open the migration page

Admins: go to Settings → Integrations → Outlook and click Migrate to Exchange. Power users can open the same page with the Open migration action described in Disconnecting Outlook for a migrated user. The page shows your organization’s self-domains and the mail lookback, calendar lookback, and calendar lookahead windows that apply to migrated users.
2

Select users

On the Eligible tab, select the users to migrate. You can select up to 100 users at a time. The Migrated tab lists users already moved to Exchange. The Other tab lists users you can’t migrate, such as users with an unhealthy Outlook connection, a native Exchange connection, or a conflict.
3

Choose what to store

For each selected user, choose Mail, Calendar, and/or Contacts. Every selected user needs at least one category.
People created from contacts cannot always be undone later.
4

Run preflight

Click Run preflight to confirm that each selected user’s Outlook sign-in still works. Preflight doesn’t store anything. Users whose sign-in is unusable need to reconnect Outlook before you migrate them.
5

Acknowledge and apply

Select the acknowledgement checkbox, then click Apply migration to start storing the selected data in Exchange. The results show whether each user was created, already migrated, skipped, or failed.

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Manage migrated users

On the Migrated tab, each user has these actions:
  • Pause stops ingestion and keeps its place.
  • Resume starts ingestion again from where it left off.
  • Remove stops Exchange ingestion for the user. Metal doesn’t delete activity that was already stored.

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Disconnecting Outlook for a migrated user

A migrated user’s Exchange ingestion can use that user’s Outlook sign-in. While a migration uses the Outlook credential, Metal blocks disconnecting Outlook and shows Outlook is still used by Exchange ingestion. To disconnect Outlook, an admin or power user must first pause or remove the user’s Exchange migration. Admins and power users can click Open migration in the message to go to the migration page.