---
title: Synced email copies can hijack Odoo’s reply routing
description: Storing a copy of an email on a contact in Odoo can pull customer replies away from the order or ticket they belong to. What to avoid when building an email sync.
---

[Insights | Orbital Objectives](https://orbitalobjectives.com/insights)

# [Synced email copies can hijack Odoo’s reply routing](https://orbitalobjectives.com/insights/synced-email-copies-can-hijack-odoos-reply-routing)

 Written by [Orbital Objectives](https://orbitalobjectives.com/insights/author/orbital-objectives) | Nov 12, 2026, 2:43:03 PM

Logging customer email on the contact record sounds harmless. Built the obvious way, it breaks something far more important: where replies land.

## How replies find their record

When an email arrives, Odoo looks at which message it replies to and attaches it to the record holding that message. If a sync has stored a second copy of that same message on a contact, with the original message ID, the copy can win. The customer’s reply to a quotation then lands on the contact, and the salesperson watching the order never sees it.

## The second trap: automatic replies

Posting a message through the standard chatter method can trigger out-of-office and auto-reply behaviour, even when you pass no recipients. A sync that back-fills a year of mail can send a year of automatic replies.

## Rules for a safe sync

- Never store the original message ID on the synced copy. Keep it in your own sync log for de-duplication.
- Create messages with the low-level method that records without notifying, not the one that posts.
- Skip mail Odoo already holds, internal mail and anything addressed to a shared alias.
- Back-fill oldest first. Chatter is ordered by record, not by date, so the order you insert is the order people read.

It is also possible to do all of this without a new cloud project, by reusing the sign-in each user already granted for sending mail from Odoo.

[View full post](https://orbitalobjectives.com/insights/synced-email-copies-can-hijack-odoos-reply-routing)

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