How to Set Up Email Sync in Zoho CRM

If your mailboxes aren't connected to Zoho CRM, the conversations your team has with leads and customers live only in individual inboxes. Nobody else can see them — not a colleague picking up an account, not a manager, not whoever covers when someone's off sick. Connecting email sync is one of the first things to do in any Zoho CRM.

What you get

• Every email between you and a lead or contact appears in the Emails section of their record.
• On an account, emails with all of its contacts roll up, so account managers see the full picture.
• Emails only attach to records that exist in CRM. Correspondence with people who aren't leads or contacts — your accountant, say — isn't pulled in.

Set it up

1. In Zoho CRM go to Setup → Channels → Email, then Email again (you do click it twice).
2. Click Get started and choose your provider — for most businesses, Office 365 / Microsoft 365. Zoho Mail, Gmail and others are supported too.
3. Protocol: leave it on IMAP unless you have a reason to change it (see below).
4. Sync history: choose how far back to sync, for example the last two years. This option is newer — previously Zoho synced all of your history, which could take a long time and bring in years of emails that were no longer relevant.
5. Click Configure and sign in to your Microsoft account. The sync status shows as in progress until it completes.

Each user connects their own mailbox.

Keep private emails out

Not everyone wants every email in CRM — a managing director, for example, may have strategic conversations that shouldn't be widely visible. There are three approaches:

1. Sync the whole inbox — everything to and from anyone who is a lead or contact in CRM.
2. Share selectively — for people whose email is mostly not sales-related, don't sync the inbox; they share the odd relevant email into CRM instead.
3. Sync with excluded domains — the middle ground. Sync everything, but block domains that should never appear: your own company domain, your accountant's, your solicitor's. Even if a contact exists with one of those addresses, emails won't sync.

IMAP or POP?

• IMAP shows emails from your mailbox in CRM without storing copies, so it doesn't use your Zoho storage. It's our default recommendation.
• POP copies emails into Zoho, which uses storage.

The catch with IMAP: if someone leaves and their mailbox is closed, their emails disappear from CRM. Zoho CRM has an email backup function for exactly this — use it to copy a leaver's emails into CRM before the mailbox is shut down. Your IT policy may also dictate which protocol you can use.

Related: related lists get easier to use

Once email and activity history build up, related lists on a record can get long. Zoho has been rolling out expandable, filterable related lists: expand a list to a full page showing up to 100 records at a time, then filter it to find what you need.

Watch the June 2026 What's New in Zoho webinar for a walkthrough.