Hi community, can you help - I had expected from testing and the documentation that the Emails and Activities timelines are attached to an email address in an email column. But further testing is showing that new timeline items are attached to any person/team in a people column as well. Can i stop this at a global level?
Essentially that makes emails and activities completely useless wherever we want to assign an item to a monday user
We want to track emails and activities for clients (items and related items linked by mirrored email field) but we do not want a monday user who handles multiple clients to see all of the activities across their clients in the widget for any client! Same for teams!
I cannot see any standard filter for this! I don’t want to abandon either E&A or assignment of records to people? Please if anyone has a solution i’d be very grateful
You’re absolutely right in observing that Emails & Activities (E&A) in monday.com can associate timeline entries not only with email addresses in Email columns but also with users or teams in People columns. Unfortunately, there is currently no global setting to disable this behavior, and this has been a known limitation for many users.
Workarounds I could suggest to try
- Avoid using the People column for client-facing boards where E&A is critical. Instead, use a custom dropdown or status column to assign internal ownership.
- Use mirrored Email columns across linked boards to ensure E&A only pulls from the intended contact email.
- Create filtered views in the Emails & Activities widget to manually limit what’s shown—though this is not a perfect solution.
- Submit a feature request or upvote existing ones in the monday.com community forum to push for board-specific E&A settings.
Hope this helps, let me know with a like or possibly add a feature request?
Thanks Clare for the reply.
I’m still trying to understand the behaviour as it is not consistently applying activity notes to all items with the same people column values when the E&A item card widget is used on the same board, only most of the time. Any insight on this?
Regarding workaround #2 – is your suggestion that the activities in the E&A widget on a given board will be applied differently to people/email values IF the email is in a mirrored column and housed on a linked board compared to if the board is the primary host of the true email column?
Hello!
You’re facing a common challenge with monday.com’s Emails & Activities (E&A) app: it connects activities not just to email addresses in “Email” columns but also to individuals in “People” columns. This means if a monday.com user is assigned to multiple client items, their E&A widget can show all activities across all those items, making it hard to track client-specific interactions. Unfortunately, there isn’t a global setting to stop E&A from associating with “People” columns. Your best approach is to implement strict internal guidelines for your team, ensuring they primarily use E&A for client-facing communications and log internal discussions in the regular “Updates” section. You can also leverage dashboards with strong filters to get a more client-centric view of activities. upsers login
Monday.com support have confirmed that this behaviour is not expected, although it turns out it is connected board column values that are creating shared activity timelines between tiems (not people, not email).
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Further testing shows this behaviour for ANY connected board column in the Contacts board only - this is not dependent upon whether the connected boards do not have any email addresses or has a mirrored email address from Contacts
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Testing shows this does NOT occur in other boards where there are shared connected board column values and the E&A app is installed. This is the case where the board has no email column or has a mirrored email column from Contacts.
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If this only happens on the Contacts board it could be a problem linked to the prime email address column being located in this board, as well as an erroneous trigger from the connected board column
The E&A app is useless if the home board for the email address cannot be connected to any other board without mis-assigning activities to the wrong item timelines.
I will update this if i get a resolution from monday support
Hey, I can suggest you an alternative: There’s a marketplace app named SuperMail, that works similar to E&A, main difference in the context of the conversation is that emails are being documented according to the item ID rather by the email or people column.
Meaning you would only see relevant conversations in a specific item.
On top of that it has a lot of other added value, sending designed automated emails with attachments, send to mirrored column via automation, cc, bcc, update a status column directly from an email, and more…