Email to Salesforce – Overview of a Top 3 Productivity Feature

Use Email to Salesforce via Bcc Field - Credit Salesforce.com Help

One of my favorite features in Salesforce.com is Email to Salesforce.  It allows Users to send an email from their preferred mail client, BCC a unique email address, and have that email copied into Salesforce and associated with a Lead or Contact, Account and open Opportunity.  It even supports file attachments being copied into Salesforce!  For a busy sales team that leverages email in their selling efforts, this is a god send.

Activation requires a simple checkbox check by an Administrator.  After that, each User is free to adjust their settings and get underway, BCC’ing their personal Email to Salesforce email address (an extremely long mess of characters) on emails they want preserved in the system.  Our best practice is for each User to copy their own long unique address, and create a Contact in their mail client (i.e. Outlook, Gmail, Entourage, etc) with an easy to remember name such as “SFDC” or “Salesforce” and that long email address.  Then Users can simply fire off emails, BCC’ing that address, and know that they’ll end up in Salesforce, associated to the correct Lead or Contact.

Before Users get going, they’ll want to take a moment to update their Email to Salesforce settings.  Out of the box, Email to Salesforce does not associate emails to Opportunities or save file attachments- which takes two checks to correct.  By default Email to Salesforce sends a confirmation email for every outgoing email-  which I can’t stand, and immediately deactivate.

A recent feature enhancement allows us to prevent Email to Salesforce from firing on certain email domains, like our own.


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May 4, 2012

David Carnes - Founder & CEO

about the author

David Carnes

David’s role as Chairman & Chief Digital Evangelist is centered around driving meaningful client engagement and business development. The key to this is serving as an advisor to OpFocus’ SaaS clients as they scale their revenue operations and embrace digital transformation.

In his early career, David worked in IT and operations for software companies, developing an interest in CRM, marketing automation, and analytics while building out systems, processes, data, and reporting for the business teams he supported. He earned a Masters in Software Engineering and credits a Harvard summer class in database management for opening his eyes to what systems could do to support operations. In founding OpFocus in 2006 David took another step toward focusing on business operations, seizing on Salesforce’s vision and never looking back.

David is a frequent speaker at Salesforce and Salesforce community events around the world, mentors through the Trailblazer Mentorship Program hosts Dashboard Dōjō, and serves as a Platform Champion and a Pi-TaP board member. Due to his involvement in the trailblazer community, David’s recently been awarded the position of Salesforce MVP!