One of the things I asked SF about early on was how we get customer emails into the system. They said we needed to copy-paste the contents of the email into SF. After realising they weren't joking (!), I was pleased to hear about the Outlook plugin, which deals with many of my concerns.

But.. this still relies on a human being to shove an incoming email into the system. So if for example a customer emails us, and we're short-staffed, and the email doesn't get dragged into SF for a few hours, it negates a lot of the benefits of the queuing and auto-escalation systems.

So my curiosity is whether anyone has put together, or is considering putting together, an app that will poll a mail server (for us, it would need to be via IMAP), pull incoming emails into SF, and then file them in another folder. The benefit then is that emails go directly and almost immediately into SF to be handled appropriately.

Is this feasible given the way SF works? How would emails be pulled in? How can we ensure emails that are pulled in are dealt with appropriately by support and sales personnel? My sense is that for this to work all emails would need to be shoved into SF as Cases, to ensure they were seen and handled by customer service people. Would that cause problems?

I welcome your thoughts.

Ollie