Frustrating Email Duplication and Timeline Issues Between Zoho Mail and CRM

Frustrating Email Duplication and Timeline Issues Between Zoho Mail and CRM

Hi Zoho team,

Can someone please help clarify what’s going on here?

Here’s what’s happening: I initiate an email to a lead using Zoho Mail. The lead is created in Zoho CRM via the integration, and the email is correctly associated with that lead. Sometimes, I also need to manually click “Associate” between the email and the CRM record. At this stage, everything seems OK – the sent email appears in my Zoho Mail “Sent” folder and is linked in the CRM record as expected.

I believe the issue begins once I click "Associate". In Zoho CRM, I suddenly see two copies of each email (happening for both sent and received emails) – one marked as source “External” and the other as source “IMAP.” I don’t understand why this duplication happens, what these source tags actually mean, or how to stop it. It’s confusing and unhelpful.

To make matters worse, the CRM timeline doesn’t behave consistently. Sometimes my sent messages appear there, sometimes they don’t. The Interaction tab seems to reliably show received emails, but it only displays sent emails if they were composed directly inside Zoho CRM. Any message sent from Zoho Mail – even though it’s part of the same ecosystem – either disappears or shows up incorrectly. That disconnect breaks the communication continuity I rely on and undermines my trust in the system.

I had expected a seamless experience between Zoho Mail and Zoho CRM, particularly since they’re developed by the same company. Instead, I’m left dealing with duplicated entries, missing emails, and a timeline that offers an incomplete or distorted view of customer conversations. Ironically, Gmail and Pipedrive – two completely separate products – appear to offer a more integrated and consistent user experience than Zoho’s own tools.

At this point, I’m just trying to get a reliable setup where each email – whether sent or received – appears only once, is properly linked to the relevant lead or contact, and shows up clearly in the CRM timeline, regardless of where it was written. That shouldn’t be too much to ask.

I’d really appreciate a clear explanation of how this behavior can be fixed and how to configure Zoho in a way that delivers the unified, dependable record of communication that I need to run my business effectively.

Thanks