Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://support.affinity.co/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
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)
- Sync your calendar
- Add email aliases or alternate addresses
- Control what gets synced (and what doesn’t)
- Protect personal calendar data
- (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.
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
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.
Expected Outcome
Your email is connected, and within a few hours, contact profiles will show email interaction history automatically.📚 Help Center
- Email sync
- 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: Sync Your Calendar
Context
Calendar sync captures meeting metadata: attendees, subject, time, duration. It powers meeting prep, last-met dates, and identifies relationship strength based on meeting frequency.Action
- Calendar sync is configured alongside email under Settings → Email Accounts. Look for the calendar permission option when you connect your email account.
- 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
Profiles show meeting history, “last met” dates populate, and Relationship Intelligence gains a second strong signal.📚 Help Center
Task 3: Add Email Aliases or Alternate Addresses
Context
If you use multiple email addresses for work (e.g., a personal alias, an old company address, or a shared inbox), tell Affinity about them. Otherwise interactions sent from those addresses won’t be properly attributed to you.Action
- Go to Settings → Email Accounts and open the alias settings for your connected account.
- Click “Add alias” and enter each additional address.
- Affinity will retroactively associate past mail from those aliases to your user.
Expected Outcome
All your past and future emails count toward your relationship strength, regardless of which address you sent from.📚 Help Center
Task 4: Control What Gets Synced
Context
By default, Affinity syncs everything. You can exclude specific senders, domains, or folders if you want certain communication kept out of Affinity (e.g., recruiters, personal contacts, internal company chatter).Action
- Go to Settings → Email Accounts and open the sync settings for your connected account.
- Add domains to the block list (e.g., your own company’s domain to exclude internal mail; recruiter domains).
- (Optional) Exclude specific email folders or labels.
- Save your changes — past matches will be removed and future matches will be skipped.
Expected Outcome
Affinity captures only the email traffic that’s relevant to your CRM workflows.📚 Help Center
- How to sync archived emails / folders into Affinity
- Managing data privacy in Affinity: syncing, sharing, and staying aligned
Task 5: Protect Personal Calendar Data
Context
If your work calendar contains personal events (doctor’s appointments, kids’ pickups, etc.), you can flag them as private so they aren’t captured by Affinity.Action
- In your calendar (Google Calendar / Outlook), mark personal events as “Private” or apply a specific tag/label your admin has configured.
- Affinity respects the privacy flag and won’t capture event details for those entries.
Expected Outcome
Personal events stay out of your CRM.📚 Help Center
Task 6: (Sync-Only Users) Special Invitation Flow
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
- Go to Settings → Users and Permissions → Users.
- Toggle the invitation type to “Sync-Only”.
- Enter the user’s email and send the invite.
- They’ll be prompted to connect their inbox and calendar, but won’t get app access.