NOTE! This feature is still considered BETA and is used at own risk!

Overview

Starting with AE version 2017.26, AE is offering a new feature, allowing you to remove the email body text from within CRM and replace it with a text-only and line break conserving representation of the former email body. The complete email body content is moved to an azure blob storage and streamed into CRM on accessing the email.

CRM Timeline and CRM Activity overview will per default only show the shortened text to allow for more information in less space. 

Why?

Emails are often consisting of mostly HTML formatting information. Inlcuding header, footer and maybe an embedded company logo, the content of an EMPTY email can be up to 30 kilobytes in size. In most companies, an email conversation usually consists of several replies and each reply will replicate the full HTML content of the previous emails, adding those 30 kilobytes AGAIN on every answer you write and possibly the same sized formatting information from the recipient of the email.

Asuming the above, a conversation, that contains an email being answered 4 times is generating a total overhead of 550kb. Still not much, but it adds up.

If you have 100.000 emails in your system and only half of them would be part of a conversation as sketched above, those emails add up to 10.000 conversations at 5 emails, occupying up to 5 Gb of space in the ActivityPointerBase table without containing any information yet. Also the actual email text is being replicated in each answer, growing the size even further. Not to mention that nearly all of the one-direction emails will contain a certain amount of HTML information on their own.

Remember, as of Q2 2019, the maximum table size of the WHOLE CRM database (excluding attachments) is 10 GB without additional cost.

How?

AttachmentExtractor is inspecting each email in CRM and looks for known seperators of emails. If any is found, the email is cut and then all HTML tags except linebreaks are removed from the email body. The original body is stored in an AzureBlobStorage and the plaintext representation of the email body is left in CRM. When you are opening an email, a plugin will retrieve the unchanged emailbody from the AzureBlobStorage and replace the stripped down version with the full content.

What is not  supported?

AttachmentExtractor preserves both, the original modified by and modified on, therefore not all emails might be processed.

• The email must habe a valid state/status combination
  (e.g. you cannot have a completed (state) draft (status) email, as CRM does not support this combination
  NOTE! As email state/status code pairs can be customized, AttachmentExtractor will only process emails, where those are still defined in CRM!
• All activityparties of the email (from, to, cc, bcc) must be resolved to an existing entity in CRM
• All activityparties of the email (from, to, cc, bcc) must have the "allow email" property set to allow.
• Alternative email body storage options are NOT supported (due to accesstime) (Only AzureBlobStorage)