The CRM page https://www.odoo.com/page/crm says:
save time by integrating emails from all your contacts directly into the application.
But I could not find any way to get mails from my email account into the application and linked to opportunities. It is a very important feature for me as most of my sales activities are email based.
Hello JC François, Once you have created an opportunity, you will see that you can manage the mail exchanges with the customer by entering them directly in the bottom of the opportunity. On the right side, you have the list of followers of the specific opportunity. You can see the followers in the technical part of the settings under email, followers, cdm.lead (it shows all the followers a a specific lead or opportunity). Whenever you receive an e-mail to a message you sent using Odoo, the message will be sent to your standard e-mail and you will be able to answer it directly from within your e-mail client. The messages received and sent will be automatically added below the opportunity. I hope this answers your question Good luck
And you may activate the automatic lead generation in the sales module setting. That will transform mails sent to a specific address into leads.
Thanks Eva. I was able to send a mail to a test customer from the form at the bottom of the opportunity so that's good. However, when the customer replied to the mail received, the response gets sent to catchall@mydomain.com. As this address does not exist, my mail server bounces the message. I went ahead and created a mailbox named "catchall" on my mail server. Now the response from the customer comes in but nothing else happens.
I tried and it did not work. That is because the configured mail account is for the mailbox my.name@mydomain.com and not for catchall@mydomain.com. The reply got sent to catchall and not to me. Why does it go to catchall in the first place? Thanks for your help.
Well, it does not work :-) I can't find settings/email/aliases... The closest is Settings/General Settings/Email/Alias Domain with the follwoing tooltip: "If you have set-up a catchall email redirected to the odoo server, enter the domain here". Does that imply that I have to redirect catchall@mydomain.com to some address on the odoo server? Which one?
Under incoming email gateway I configured my personal IMAP account that is running on the server of the company hosting my web site.
OK, that is what I thought BUT: Odoo does not have access to the catchall mailbox on my email server. Should I configure an additional email gateway with that mailbox?
It was a bit tricky to set up but It works now. Thanks a lot Eva, you are a star!