Salesforce Summer ‘23 Feature : Send Email and Create Activity

Salesforce Summer’23 Feature : Send Email from Flow creates Activity automatically

It was only a few months ago that I had written about a fundamental flaw in the Salesforce Flows. When an email is send from a Flow using ‘Send Email’ core action, there’s no option to log an Activity. Original story here.

An idea in Idea exchange that had been open since 2007 is also here: https://ideas.salesforce.com/s/idea/a0B8W00000Gdig2UAB/workflow-email-alerts-to-contacts-should-be-recordable-as-activity-history

Finally, after 16 years of waiting Salesforce has now implemented this feature. Documentation in Summer ‘23 Release notes here. Let’s check what has changed.

What’s the difference?

Compared to the old Send Email core action, the following options/parameters are now available:

• Email Template ID
• Log Email on Send
• Recipient ID
• Related Record ID

New Parameters in Send Email Action

This means, we can optionally log an activity using the Boolean Log Email on Send. Email Template Id can be passed in and the Recipient ID will define the Lead, Contact or Person Account to whom the email will be sent. Also, the same Recipient ID, if provided, will be used for the merge fields in the Email Template. Related Record ID can be used to pass in a secondary record to which an activity can be logged.

Try it out

Step 1: Set up records to be used for sending email. I have created a Contact record and created an Opportunity linked to it.

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Step 2: Create a Flow with steps as seen below. Get the Opportunity record details in advance before the Send Email step.

Simple Test Flow to Send Email and Log Activity

Step 3: Use the Send Email (emailSimple-emailSimple) as the core action for the above ‘Send Email to Opportunity Contact’ step and the input parameters needs to be setup as seen below. This input will create an Activity in both Opportunity and Contact record.

Search for Send Email core action

Set Parameters

Step 4: After saving the flow, Run or Debug. Navigate to both Opportunity and Contact records to view the Email Activity created.

Activity automatically created in Opportunity

Activity automatically created in Contacts

Conclusion

I’m sure this will turn out to be a widely used feature. A minor limitation I noted was that, the Recipient ID can not be set as a User record Id — for example, if we want to send an email to a Case Owner, this can not be used. Also, I haven’t tested out the Email merge functionality using the Email Template Id.

I’m specifically interested to know what happens when the Merge Fields in the Email Template are from the Related Record and not the Recipient record. Please comment if anyone else has tried this.