Moving four years of email into a CRM, where the history might be worthless

22 units, three spreadsheets, and four years of Gmail. I'm moving to a real CRM this month because I've got two properties under contract and my system is a filter labeled "units."

The import is the problem. I ran a dedupe pass on the contact export and got 1,340 records down to 890, and of the 890 maybe 400 are real ongoing relationships. The rest are past applicants who never leased, vendors I used once, and a wholesaler who emailed me 60 times in 2022. Every one of those junk records carries a phone number, which means every one of them can end up in a sequence by accident.

The email history is worse. I can pipe four years of threads into the CRM and attach them to contacts, but the attachments are the only part I actually reference, and those are already in Drive folders by address.

Two options. Import everything, accept that the database starts dirty, and clean as I go. Or set a cutoff at January 1, tag 400 contacts by hand over a weekend, and leave the archive where it is, a mailbox I search but never write to again.

I'm leaning toward the cutoff. The thing holding me back is that twice in four years I've needed a 2021 conversation with a tenant to settle a dispute, and both times I found it because I searched a phrase I remembered, not because it was filed anywhere. So the archive already works for that.

Anyone regret starting clean? I keep imagining a version of this where I need the old records to be in the same place and can't stitch them back.

2 replies

1diane_kowalskiPassivePRO9

Cutoff, and keep the old mailbox forever. Search is the feature you're actually using and you already have it.

2nicole_adeyemiPassivePRO5

I'd add one thing that took me two migrations to figure out. On the land side I keep two systems on purpose. Property records are keyed to the parcel number, and they hold ownership history, tax notes, and anything recorded. Contact records live in the CRM and hold people. A person can relate to four parcels and a parcel outlives every person attached to it, so mashing them into one contact list means you lose the property history every time a relationship goes cold.

For 22 units the equivalent is a record per address that doesn't depend on who was living there. If your CRM makes that awkward, that's a real limit and worth checking before you spend a weekend tagging.

On the junk records, don't delete them. Import them with a status of archived and every automation filtered to active only. Deleting a past applicant is fine until you get a fair housing question about why someone wasn't approved, and screening record retention rules vary by state, so ask an attorney in your state what you're required to keep before you clear anything out.

Moving four years of email into a CRM, where the history might be worthless

2 replies