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Activities & the timeline

An activity is something a person on your team did about a record — a call made, an email sent, a meeting held, a note worth keeping. It is logged by hand, from the record it is about — or, for an email, written and sent from there — and it sits in one timeline beside everything the platform captured about that person on its own and every campaign email it sent them.

Four kinds of history​

A contact's timeline is one newest-first stream drawn from four sources, and every entry says which it is:

EntryWhere it comes fromWho can change it
CapturedThe platform recorded it — a form submission, an order, a booking, a member sign-up, a newsletter opt-in, an API or import create, or a contact added by hand. Each carries the door it came through and, for a form, the page the person was on.Nobody. It is a record of what happened.
LoggedA member of your team logged it — a call, an email, a meeting, a note, or something else.Its author, or an org-wide member.
SentAn email the platform sent to this person from their record — by a teammate with Send email, or by an automation's Send an email step. It carries its subject, the address it went to, and where delivery got to. See Sending an email.Nobody edits what was sent; its author or an org-wide member may delete it.
CampaignA campaign email the platform delivered to the person — which email, when it went out, and what became of it. See Campaign email on the timeline.Nobody. It is the delivery record.

A captured entry from this site carries a link to its record: Open submission lands on the Inbox with the reader open on that submission, Open order on the orders list with the order's dialog open, and a booking or a sign-up on the Bookings or Users page. An entry from another site in your workspace — read on that site's console — or one written before the site was stamped on it is shown without a link.

Captured history lives on the contact and is kept to the most recent fifty entries. Logged activity is a collection of its own, bounded at 5,000 entries per record — a call a day for fourteen years, so nobody working a real relationship reaches it, and an automation logging on every event cannot fill one person's log without limit. At the ceiling, Log activity, the Log a CRM activity step and POST /v1/activities refuse another entry on that record and say so; the timeline reads it a hundred entries at a time and offers Show more activity while older entries remain. Campaign email is read from the delivery log the moment the page opens, over the newest fifty messages sent to the address.

A logged or sent Email activity and a Campaign entry are different things and are drawn differently: the first is a message somebody on your team wrote, sent or recorded, the second is a mailing the platform sent to an audience the person was in.

Campaign email on the timeline​

Every campaign email sent to the person from this site — or from a site declared to be one sender with it — appears at the moment it was sent, in one line:

Spring sale · sent · delivered · opened ×2 · clicked

The name is the email as your team named it on Emails › Messages, or its subject when it has no name, and it links to that email's own report. The words after it are the states the email reached, in order: delivered, opened (with a count past one), clicked (likewise), bounced, or marked as spam. The subject line rides under the entry when it differs from the name.

What appears, and what does not:

  • Campaigns only. A receipt, a booking confirmation, a password reset or an invite is not on a CRM timeline — those are account mail, sent to the person rather than to an audience.
  • Your sites' campaigns only. A contact record is shared by every site in your workspace, and other businesses in the same workspace that mail the same person never see each other's campaigns here. A campaign sent by a sibling site in your own consent group is listed, without a link — that site's Emails console is its own.
  • The newest fifty messages to the address are read. Somebody mailed heavily by several sites can have older campaign entries fall past the window.
  • Opens and clicks need the delivery webhook. An email sent before it was connected shows as sent and nothing more, the same gap the campaign report itself reports.
  • An email your team has deleted keeps its entry, named by the subject the person received, with no report to link to.

The timeline says so when the delivery log could not be read, rather than showing an empty history — the two lead to opposite conclusions about the relationship.

The most recent open or click across all of these is the record's Last engaged stamp, which a re-engagement audience can be built from.

Logging an activity​

Open the record — a contact's page under CRM › Contacts, a company's under Companies, a deal's under Deals, or a lead's under Leads — and choose Log activity. The activity is filed against that record; there is no picker, because what you are looking at is what the activity is about.

FieldWhat it is
KindCall, Email, Meeting, Note or Other.
WhenWhen it happened, which is not always when you are logging it. Defaults to now.
What happenedThe body of the entry.
OutcomeFor a call or a meeting: how it ended — "left a voicemail", "agreed to a trial".
MinutesFor a call or a meeting: how long it took.

Each entry shows who logged it and how long ago. The author can edit or delete their own entries; an org-wide member can edit or delete anyone's. A colleague with access to only some of your sites can read an entry they did not write, and cannot change it.

Sending an email​

A contact's, a lead's and a deal's page each carry Send email: one message, from you, to the person the record is about. It is a letter, not a campaign — there is no audience, no template and no unsubscribe footer — and it is logged on the timeline the moment it leaves, with its delivery state following.

FieldWhat it is
ToThe record's own address. It cannot be changed here: a deal writes to its contact, a lead to the address it was captured with.
FromThe site's sending address — the same identity campaigns and transactional mail leave on — with your name in front of it.
Reply-toYour own address, so a reply lands in your inbox rather than the site's mailbox.
Subject and MessageWhat you write. The message is plain text; a blank line starts a new paragraph.

The send is refused, and the dialog says why, when:

  • the site has no sending identity in effect — an admin sets one up under Emails › Sending, and the dialog links there;
  • the address is on a suppression list because it bounced or reported a message as spam, or the person has asked this site not to email them;
  • the organization has reached its one-to-one email allowance for the day — see the cap, which resets at midnight UTC;
  • you have sent more than twenty emails in the last minute.

Every sent email counts toward the organization's email usage like any other message.

At the organization level the message still leaves from one site: the site that captured the person, or — for a record no site captured — the one you pick under Send from. The dialog links that site's Emails › Sending page when it cannot send.

Delivery states​

A sent email's entry shows a chip beside Email that follows the message:

ChipMeaning
SentThe mail provider accepted it.
DeliveredThe recipient's mail server accepted it.
OpenedThe recipient opened it, as far as an open can be known.
ClickedThe recipient followed a link in it.
BouncedThe mailbox refused it. The address is suppressed and cannot be emailed again from this site.
Marked as spamThe recipient reported it. The address is suppressed.

The chip only ever moves forward — a late "delivered" never replaces an "opened" — and a bounce or a complaint stands over anything that came before it. Hover the chip for when the state was reached.

Where an activity is visible​

An activity is visible exactly where a contact captured on the same site would be: to that site alone, or to every site declared to be one sender with it, or to the whole organization when the organization has chosen an org-wide default. Logging an activity never widens what a scoped member can see, and a section of the CRM can never show an activity to somebody who could not open the record it belongs to.

The recent activity feed​

The Contacts section shows the newest activity logged across the CRM under the list — the last few calls, emails, meetings and notes anyone on the team filed against any record — each linking to the record it is about. It is a glance at what the team has been doing; the record's own page is where the whole log lives.