File client and candidate mail from Microsoft 365 on the record

Access will be through Microsoft Graph with an application registration your administrator can review. Conditional access policies, multi-factor requirements and device compliance rules stay in force; the connector does not sit outside them.

Scopes will be narrow and named: mail read and mail send. Calendar is requested separately. Contacts, files and directory scopes are not requested at all, because nothing in recruitment software needs to enumerate your company directory, and asking for it would fail a governance review that any competent administrator will run.

Where an organisation restricts consent to administrators, the grant is made once at tenant level and individual recruiters then connect within it. Where user consent is permitted, a recruiter can connect their own mailbox directly.

Agencies frequently run a desk from a shared mailbox rather than an individual one: contract-it@, healthcare@, or a client-specific address that several recruiters watch. A connector that only understands one human per mailbox breaks immediately on that pattern.

The planned support treats a shared mailbox as a first-class connection owned by the mailbox rather than by a recruiter. Mail filed from it lands on the candidate or client record with the desk as the source, so it survives a recruiter leaving. Sending from a shared address requires the send-as permission Microsoft already governs, and the connector will respect that rather than working around it.

This is one of the places where an agency and an in-house team genuinely differ, and the agency pattern is the one most often missed.

Interview scheduling needs calendar access. Mail filing does not. Bundling the two into one consent means an organisation that wants scheduling has to grant mailbox access it did not ask for, and an organisation that wants mail filing has to grant calendar access it did not ask for.

So the calendar scope is requested by the scheduling connector, separately, and can be granted, refused or revoked on its own. The Teams connector handles meeting generation with its own scope again. Three narrow requests that an administrator can reason about beat one broad one that gets refused.

Practically, this also means a talent team can pilot interview scheduling without a mailbox governance review, which is often the difference between a pilot starting this month or next quarter.

A message is filed when one of its participants matches a candidate or client contact in your tenant. Unmatched mail is not stored, not indexed and not shown. A recruiter can exclude addresses and domains, scope the connection to particular folders, and detach a filed message from a record without deleting it from Outlook.

Reply detection stops a running cadence the moment a candidate answers, and classifies the reply for interest, objection or availability. Bounces mark the address; automatic out-of-office replies are classified separately so they do not halt a sequence.

Sending goes out through the connected account, so messages carry your domain's own authentication and land in a candidate's inbox looking like what they are: mail from a person.

The mailbox, the tenant and the retention policies are yours. The connector reads and writes within the scopes you grant, and revoking consent in Microsoft 365 stops the sync without deleting what has already been filed on candidate records.

Retention is worth thinking about explicitly. Mail filed on a candidate record inherits that record's retention window in Surhires, which may be shorter than your Microsoft 365 policy. The two systems are not synchronised on deletion, and an erasure request handled in Surhires does not reach into your mailbox. That is a limitation, and it is better named than discovered.

It will not migrate a mailbox, act as a journaling or archiving target, or serve as an eDiscovery source. Microsoft 365 has products for those jobs and recruitment software is not one of them.

It will not read the company directory, enumerate distribution lists or index files. And it will not backfill historical mail automatically on connect; any import will be an opt-in operation over a date range you choose.