For some of our most security-conscious customers, such as customers in the medical industry who may have Protected Health Information (PHI) in their email, we support requesting more limited email access permissions. Limited access grants Gem access email headers (like the to/from email addresses and timestamp), but not the contents of the emails in your inbox.
By default, Gem requests access to read, send, and delete email from your inbox. You can read more about why Gem requires these permissions here:
- Email Permissions within Gem (Gmail)
- Email Permissions within Gem (Microsoft Outlook 365)
Both Gmail and Microsoft Office 365 have APIs that allow Gem to request more limited access to email inboxes. Unfortunately, more limited access is not supported for customers with a legacy Exchange/Outlook email server.
Tradeoffs
Limiting Gem’s access to email will disable features in Gem. We’ve attempted to list the ones we know about here, but as we continue to develop the product, new features may come out that your team may not have access to as a part of this decision.
- Gem’s automatic “Interested” reply status predictions will not be available - Because this feature requires Gem to read the body of messages (which reduced-permissions does not include access to), Gem will be unable to predict whether or not a candidate is interested and mark their reply status as such.
- More inaccurate open tracking, and inaccurate click tracking - While there are some Open Tracking to open tracking even for customers that grant Gem full access to email inboxes, there are more cases that may cause inaccuracies for customers on the limited permission set. Specifically, open counts are normally higher after a candidate replies in the standard integration, but with limited access to email, they can now be inaccurate even before a candidate replies. This is because, since Gem no longer has access to delete mail from inboxes (which we use to work around this issue), we can no longer tell whether the sender has opened the email or the recipient has. Similarly, we can no longer tell the difference between the sender clicking on links in the message and the recipient. So if the sender goes into their sent mail and clicks on a link, click counts may now be inaccurate.
- No reply content when sending from a different email account - Normally, when you send as a hiring manager, we notify the sender of the sequence when a candidate replies, along with the content of that candidate’s reply. Because Gem can no longer see the contents of messages, your team will have to contact the hiring manager to learn whether that recipient replied positively or negatively. The following image shows a notification with reply content included; the reply content would not be available with limited access.
- Greenhouse activity feed sync will not have the email content For our customers who have enabled our system to sync email content sent outside of Gem to the Greenhouse activity feed, the email activity (from, to, subject) will still be posted, but the content of the email will not be included since we can no longer see the content of emails. The following screenshot is a normal Greenhouse activity with email content included.
- No email content in candidate activities For email content sent outside of Gem in the Gem activity feed for a candidate, you can preview the content of these email activities without leaving Gem. For limited access customers, the content will not be available. However, information about when and who on the team sent or received an email with the candidate outside of Gem is still available. The following image shows an activity with email content loaded; limited access customers will not have the content available.
Have any issues or questions on this topic? Please feel free to contact your dedicated Gem Customer Success Manager directly or our Support team at support@gem.com.
- Tradeoffs