Connecting your email is one of the most impactful things you can do in Alva. Once connected, Alva reads your conversations and automatically surfaces commitments, sentiment, buying signals, risks, and next steps — keeping your CRM up to date without manual data entry.
Supported providers
Alva supports connecting email via:
- Google (Gmail / Google Workspace) — OAuth connection
- Microsoft 365 (Outlook) — OAuth connection
- IMAP — for other email providers (manual configuration)
How to connect
Go to Settings → Email Connections and click Connect Account.
Google or Microsoft
- Click Connect Google or Connect Microsoft
- You’ll be redirected to sign in with your email provider
- Grant Alva permission to read and send emails
- You’re redirected back to Alva — the connection is live
IMAP
For other providers, click Connect via IMAP and enter:
- IMAP server address and port
- SMTP server address and port
- Your email address and password
What Alva reads
Once connected, Alva syncs your email conversations and analyses them for:
- Sentiment — is the conversation positive, negative, or neutral?
- Intent — what is the sender trying to do? (request, question, commitment, etc.)
- Urgency — how time-sensitive is this?
- Buying signals — phrases that indicate purchase intent
- Risk signals — phrases that indicate the deal might be in trouble
- Questions — prospect questions that need answers
- Commitments — things someone has promised to do
This analysis happens automatically in the background. Results appear on deal, contact, and company detail pages.
What Alva can send
With a connected email account, Alva can:
Managing connections
From Settings → Email Connections, you can:
- View all connected accounts (admins see all team members’ connections)
- See sync status and last sync time
- Disconnect an account
- Re-authenticate if the connection has expired
You don’t need to connect your email right away, but the sooner you do, the more Alva can help. Most AI features — deal health scoring, risk detection, email intelligence — work best with email connected.
Privacy
Alva only reads emails associated with your business conversations. Email content is processed for analysis and the results (sentiment, signals, entities) are stored — but raw email content is not shared with anyone outside your account. All data is isolated to your account. 
