Starting with a blank Folk workspace
When I first opened Folk, it felt like staring at one of those super clean whiteboards in a conference room that everyone is afraid to write on. No contacts, no tags, nothing. Just promise. The first thing I did was import a small CSV from my Gmail contacts export. I specifically avoided bringing in my entire Gmail contact history because that would have been chaos — the CSV from Google includes every email address you’ve ever interacted with, even that one time you emailed a pizza place in 2018 :P.
When you import into Folk, you can map the columns of your CSV to fields like Name, Email, Company, Notes. This is where I caught my first hiccup: my “Notes” column from Gmail was just empty cells. Gmail doesn’t export those unless you’ve manually entered them. If you want a note column populated, you’ll have to create it directly in Folk later.
I made a “Tag” field to keep track of what type of person each contact is: friend, freelancer, potential client, or “don’t even remember how we met.” The best part here is that you can bulk edit tags after import — seriously, do that instead of meticulously tagging one at a time. I learned that the hard way.
Connecting Gmail for syncing
So here’s the thing — linking Gmail to Folk isn’t exactly one click, even though it kind of pretends it is. You go into Settings > Integrations in Folk, hit “Connect Gmail,” log in, grant permissions, and… nothing happens at first. It just sits there as “Connecting…” with no progress bar. In my case it stayed like that for almost a minute before jumping to “Connected.” If you panic and click again, you’ll actually disconnect it, so hands off.
Once Gmail was connected, Folk pulled in recent conversations with the contacts I already had in there. “Recent” in this context was about the last month’s worth. That meant a bunch of my older email threads were not visible, which was mildly annoying because half the reason I wanted this system was to remember the last time I emailed people from last year.
There’s a workaround: you can manually forward older emails to yourself and BCC your Folk dropbox address so those appear in the timeline. It’s not elegant, but it works.
Creating custom fields for context
A personal CRM is useless if it’s just names and email addresses. So I added custom fields: “Last time we met in person,” “Topics they care about,” and “Reminders.” Folk lets you create these pretty fluidly, and they feel less rigid than traditional CRMs.
The thing to watch for is that custom fields are per workspace, not per group — meaning if you create a weird one (like I did with “Favorite chips flavor”), you’re going to see that field everywhere unless you delete it. I wish Folk let you hide fields per view but nope. The upside is you can filter contacts by these custom fields, which is surprisingly powerful if you’re consistent in filling them out.
Using groups to make this manageable
In Folk, groups work kind of like folders but also sort of like tags. I use groups for “Clients,” “Potential Collabs,” “Friends,” and “Lost Touch.” This way I can look at a group and see everyone I should check in with, without having to scroll endlessly.
Moving people between groups is drag and drop, which I love. But there’s one oddity: if you have a contact in multiple groups, moving them out of one doesn’t delete them — they live in all assigned groups until manually untagged. I had a few “double-listed” people causing awkward double reminders until I figured this out.
Setting up follow up reminders
Folk has a little bell icon for reminders next to each contact. I usually set mine to “in 1 month” if I’ve just talked to someone. But — and this is important — reminders don’t send you an email. They show up inside Folk itself, in “Today’s tasks.” That’s fine if you open Folk every morning, but if you’re like me and only remember to open it when you’re procrastinating on something else, you’ll miss them.
To fix that, I made a Zapier automation from Folk’s exported CSV + Google Sheets to trigger an email reminder to myself through Gmail whenever a follow up date is near. Yes, it’s clunky. Yes, it works.
Searching inside Folk without losing your mind
Search in Folk is global — as in, no matter what group you’re in, the search bar will look at the whole database. That’s great until you type “Josh” and realize you used to know eight Joshes and now have no idea which one you actually wanted. My trick is to search for part of the email address if possible, or to filter by a custom field before searching.
If you hit Enter too fast after typing, the page freezes for a moment when loading a big result set. Not catastrophic, but just long enough to make you wonder if the tab crashed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Keeping Gmail and Folk in sync over time
The integration is more like “every so often” syncing, not real time. If you add a new contact in Gmail, it might take a while before it pops up in Folk. I’ve had delays of several hours. If you need it instantly, you can trigger a manual sync from Settings, but that’s buried and easy to forget.
When a contact’s details change in Gmail, sometimes the changes do not overwrite in Folk unless you manually refresh them. I’ve had job titles stick around from years ago because Folk pulled them once and never updated. The safest workflow seems to be making Folk your main point of data entry, and letting Gmail just be the email front end.
When something randomly stops working
True story: one Tuesday, my Gmail integration just said “Error syncing” with no explanation. The only way to fix it was to disconnect Gmail in Folk, reauthorize, and let it re-pull all recent activity. This annoyingly caused some entries to show up twice, but at that point I just bulk deleted duplicates and moved on. The error log said something vague like `Sync process halted due to TOKEN_EXPIRED`, which made zero sense because I had reauthorized that week.
My takeaway — expect these hiccups and keep everything exportable. Folk lets you export all your contacts to CSV whenever you want. Do it often. That file has saved me more than once.