Question 1

What Front data can Polytomic sync?

Accepted Answer

For reads: conversations, messages, comments, contacts, contact lists, contact custom fields, conversation events, conversation tags, conversation inboxes, inboxes, channels, teammates, teams, and tags. That is broader than the public documentation suggests. For writes: contacts only. Rules and analytics are not exposed in either direction, so Front's own analytics stay in Front while ETL brings the underlying conversation data to your data warehouse where you can compute your own.

Question 2

Do message bodies and attachments come through?

Accepted Answer

Bodies yes, attachment files no. Messages expose both an HTML body and a plain text version, and comments expose their body too, so the actual content of a conversation is available for analysis. Attachments come through as metadata, covering the identifier, filename, URL, MIME type, size, whether it is inline, and its content ID. The binary itself is not downloaded, which is almost always what you want in a data warehouse.

Question 3

How does incremental syncing work?

Accepted Answer

Differently by object, and mostly through Front's event stream. Contacts sort and filter on updated time in the normal way. Conversations, messages, comments, conversation tags, and conversation inboxes each do an initial scan and then track changes through relevant Front events, which is efficient but does mean coverage depends on Front emitting an event for the change. Conversation events themselves use an emitted time cursor, and importantly a first run defaults to only the previous day rather than full event history. Inboxes, channels, teammates, tags, teams, and contact lists are full reads.

Question 4

What can I write back into Front?

Accepted Answer

Contacts, with create only, update only, and create or update, all requiring an identity. You can match on the Front contact ID or on email, and write name, description, spam status, links, group names, existing Front custom fields, and email addresses. Two constraints worth knowing for reverse ETL: email writes become Front handles and are added rather than replacing existing ones, so handles cannot be removed through a sync, and only email handles are supported, not phone or other handle types.

Question 5

How does Polytomic handle Front's rate limits?

Accepted Answer

More carefully than most connectors, because Front's limits vary by plan and are easy to exhaust. On connecting, Polytomic probes your account to discover the per minute allowance your plan actually grants, falls back to a conservative default if that fails, and then deliberately runs at eighty percent of it. The limiter is shared across the connection, simultaneous executions are disabled for this source, and rate limited responses honor the retry header with a long retry budget. The trade is that large initial scans are paced rather than fast.

Front

Perfect pairings

Message bodies included

Event driven updates

Tier aware pacing

Example workflows

What you can sync

From Front

To Front

How it works

How to set up

Frequently asked questions

Why teams choose Polytomic

No engineering required

Flexible data modeling

Handles scale automatically

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