This week Mark Slayton, Consultant at Red Argyle, gives us some valuable tips to preventing the question- “Why did Salesforce just send out a thousand emails?!” Mark is a Certified Salesforce Administrator, Advanced Administrator and Sales Cloud Consultant with over four years experience.
Every veteran admin I know has a story containing that quote. Most of them start the same way; someone was inserting or updating data into Salesforce, they forgot to or didn’t know they needed to disable a Workflow-based notification, and suddenly their org became an email fire hydrant. And I can tell you first-hand, being called into the vice president’s office to explain what’s wrong with Salesforce isn’t how you want to learn that you’ve got a problem.
So how can you protect yourself from having this particular tale added to your repertoire? There are two ways to make sure that this situation doesn’t happen to you.
Method 1: Disabling Specific Workflow Rules
Most of the time, emails that automatically go out of your system are being caused by workflows. In a workflow-heavy org, digging through everything to find potential problems can be a chore. Thankfully, you can zero in on potential issues more quickly by going directly to the source: the Email Alerts list. You can find this under Build (or App Setup in the old UI) > Create > Workflow and Approvals > Email Alerts.
This list will show you all of the Email Alerts in your org. You can sort the list by object to quickly find the email alerts relevant to the data you’re uploading. Each alert will show you which workflow rules it relates to, so you can specifically find and disable the ones that would be affected by the data work you’re about to do.
Method 2: The Nuclear Option
But maybe you want to make extra sure that there aren’t any unforeseen consequences. Maybe your org has custom Apex that sends emails, or maybe you don’t feel confident that you got everything. In this case, you may opt to go straight for the main “Off” switch. This is found under Administer (or Administration Setup in the old UI) > Email Administration > Deliverability.
The “Access level” picklist on this page is the master control for your org’s ability to send emails. There are three settings:
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“All email” means there are no restrictions on your system’s ability to send emails.
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“System email only” means that Salesforce will only send system-related emails, such as password resets or API failure notifications
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“No access” means Salesforce will not send any emails whatsoever.
Setting the level to “System email only” should be sufficient to prevent the system from sending any unintentional outbound emails. Be aware that because this is a master setting, it will also prevent your users from being able to send any emails as well, and removes the “Send an Email” button from the Activity History related list on objects.
Using one or both of these methods before you perform a data import or upload into Salesforce can help prevent you from getting your own version of the “that time I accidentally emailed the world” story. Of course it’s very important- and I can’t stress that enough- that you communicate these changes to your users ahead of time. Scheduling big data loads should be done outside of peak hours so that disruptions are kept to a minimum. Good luck, and we’ll see you in the cloud!
If you are rolling out Salesforce and need help with hitting the Salesforce ‘Mute’ Button, Training, or Salesforce customization Red Argyle offers a suite of services that will help you delivered tailored Goodness to the Salesforce platform. Contact us today, we would be happy to set up a discovery session and ensure you Salesforce implementation is a successful one.
