Salesforce is doing email sync backwards
Most email integrations I have seen put a heavy emphasis on automatically syncing FROM your inbox TO Salesforce. Makes sense at first. People are very used to Outlook, for example. But In my experience with actual end users, if you really listen closely, they aren’t actually asking for an email sync in Salesforce. They’re asking for email in Salesforce.
Some users may resent that at face value, but think about it. What’s the biggest problem with email syncing? (Aside from random messages not being synced for no reason) It‘s record association and alerts. When an email syncs from Outlook, there’s no context, no thread ID. It’s not very smart, and it’s kind of unfair to expect it to be smart given how little context it actually has.
You probably have a good idea of what I am actually getting at here. What Salesforce really needs is a full-featured native embedded email client. Ideally, it should hook into O365 or Gmail so you can use your real email still. I’m not an email expert, but I know you can just sign into emails from third party clients such as Thunderbird using IMAP, so why can’t Salesforce do this? This would effectively make Salesforce the authoritative source for email activity, and as such, conversations can be natively & persistently associated with the records you are sending from, such as Opportunity.
I understand Salesforce kind of has this already, but it’s weak and the UI is hostile to users who need to quickly associate loose emails/threads with records. And again, having a native email client inside of Salesforce gives you full, realtime visibility of your inbox and a native tool would open up a native interface to simplify record associations.
Unless I am mistaken, I don’t believe anything like this exists, although if it does that would be really cool.