Immediate Value
After this tutorial, your email and calendar will be syncing into Affinity. Every interaction with every contact will be captured automatically — which means Relationship Intelligence, profile timelines, and last-contact dates all start working for you.Prerequisites
- You’ve completed Tutorial 0.1.
- You can sign in to the Gmail or Outlook account you use for work.
Quick-Start Roadmap
- Understand why this matters first
- Sync your work email (Gmail or Outlook) and calendar
- Learn about email aliases or alternate addresses
- Control what gets synced (and what doesn’t)
- (Sync-Only users) Special invitation flow
This is the highest-leverage setup step in Affinity. Skipping it means no Relationship Intelligence, no automatic interaction tracking, and no “last contacted” data on profiles. Do this even if you skip everything else in Tier 0.
Sync also powers Affinity AI. Meeting briefs and warm-intro paths are built from your synced email and calendar, so connect sync first. Suggested field updates come from meeting notes attached to your synced external meetings — Affinity Notetaker attaches them automatically. See Put Affinity AI to Work.
Why Inbox & Calendar Sync Matters
Affinity’s core differentiator is Relationship Intelligence — knowing who on your team has the strongest relationship with any contact, when you last interacted, and how warm a path is. None of that works without email and calendar sync. Once connected, Affinity automatically captures every email and meeting with every contact in your network, with zero manual entry.See Email sync for the full overview of what gets captured.
Task 1: Sync Your Work Email and Calendar
Context
Affinity syncs Gmail, Outlook (Microsoft 365), and Exchange. The sync is one-way: Affinity reads your inbox metadata (sender, recipient, subject, timestamp) and optionally message bodies. Affinity does not send mail from your inbox without your action.🎬 Watch
Action
- Go to Settings → Email Accounts.
- Click “Add Account” in the top-right.
- Select your email provider (Google, Microsoft 365, or Exchange) and complete the OAuth sign-in.
- Grant Affinity the requested permissions when prompted.
- Affinity begins backfilling your historical email automatically.
- Click “Connect” next to Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar.
- Sign in and grant calendar read permission.
- Affinity backfills past meetings and starts ingesting new ones automatically.
Expected Outcome
Your email is connected, and within a few hours, contact profiles will show email interaction history automatically.📚 Help Center
- Email sync
- Syncing data into Affinity
- How to add or remove your synced email accounts from Affinity
- How to add or remove your synced email accounts from Affinity (continued)
- How to track emails sent through Affinity
Task 2: Learn about Email Aliases or Alternate Addresses
Context
Affinity syncs email/calendar data for email aliases that have their own primary email addresses that are connected to an actual email account. Sign in and sync your actual email account into Affinity and you should see the email/calendar interactions associated with your email alias surface accordingly.📚 Help Center
Task 3: Control What Gets Synced
Context
By default, Affinity syncs your whole mailbox. There are two ways to keep communication out of your CRM: Selective Email Sync, which syncs only the emails you choose, and your privacy preferences, which control what your teammates can see and let you hide a contact entirely.Action
To sync only the emails you choose (Selective Email Sync):- Contact Affinity Support (support@affinity.co) to turn on Selective Email Sync. It works with Gmail and Outlook, not on-premises Exchange.
- Create a label (Gmail) or folder (Outlook) named exactly Affinity — capital A.
- Apply it to the emails you want in Affinity. Everything else stays private.
- Go to Settings → Privacy.
- Choose whether to show or hide email bodies and subjects, and meeting titles, for your interactions.
- To hide all interactions with a particular person, add them to your blocklist.
Expected Outcome
Affinity captures only the email traffic that’s relevant to your CRM workflows.📚 Help Center
- Syncing data into Affinity — includes Selective Email Sync
- Setting up your privacy preferences in Affinity
- How to sync archived emails / folders into Affinity
- Managing data privacy in Affinity: syncing, sharing, and staying aligned
Task 4: Protect Personal Calendar Data
Context
Marking a meeting Private in your calendar does not keep it out of Affinity — private meetings still sync, and appear on external contacts’ profiles. What matters is which calendars Affinity can reach.Action
- If your firm’s Affinity account was created on or after March 8, 2024, Affinity syncs only your primary (work) calendar by default — even if your work calendar has edit access to a personal one.
- If it was created earlier, ask Support to sync only primary calendars for your team, or change your personal calendar’s sharing so your work account can see events but not make changes to them (Google Calendar).
- On Outlook, an admin can turn on an organization-wide setting that excludes meetings you mark as private — ask Support.
Expected Outcome
Personal events stay out of your CRM.📚 Help Center
Task 5: (Admin) Invite Sync-Only Users
Optional task. Applies only if you’re inviting users in a “Sync-Only” capacity — they contribute interaction data but don’t get full Affinity access.
Context
Sync-Only users are people on your team who don’t actively use Affinity, but whose email/calendar data you want to capture (e.g., partners who don’t open the app but whose inbox enriches the team’s relationship graph). They count against a different licensing pool.Action
First, the one-time setup:- Your IT team sets up Google impersonation (domain-wide delegation) or Microsoft Graph client credentials. On-premises Exchange isn’t supported.
- Verify ownership of your organization’s domain.
- Go to Settings → Users and Permissions and click Add user.
- Select Sync Only as the seat type, and enter their name and email.
- Choose the privacy preference for their synced emails and meetings, and on Enterprise, assign a team.
Expected Outcome
Their relationship data flows into Affinity without consuming a full seat.📚 Help Center
Task 6 (Optional): Turn On Affinity Notetaker
Context
Affinity Notetaker joins your meetings, captures notes, and attaches them to the meeting in Affinity — which is also what lets the Data Update agent suggest field updates. Available on Scale, Advanced, and Enterprise, for Google and Microsoft 365 calendars (not on-premises Exchange).Action
- Go to Settings → Notetaker.
- If you use Zoom, click Connect with Zoom.
- Under Appearance, set your Notetaker’s name and avatar.
- Under Join Automatically, choose whether it joins all meetings, only internal ones, or only external ones.
- Click Save.