How to Effectively Use the Send Email Action in Salesforce Flow: A Deep Dive

Long before we had Flow Builder, we were using legacy tools like Workflow Rules, Process Builder, and Approval Processes to send emails using Email Alerts. Times have changed, and the Flow Builder tool continues to evolve and change as well.

The Send Email tool in Salesforce Flow continues to be enhanced and improved with each release, and there may be a thing or two you were unaware of that your business could benefit from. Let’s take a look at the Send Email Action in detail, learn how it has changed over time, and discover ways to create value within your business. 

The History of the Send Email Screen Flow Action

Before we take a look at the Send Email Action in Flow Builder today, we need to look deep into the past and revisit Workflow Rules. Unlike Flow, there were only a handful of actions you could take once the criteria were met. 

One of these actions was the ability to fire an Email Alert. This was a pre-configured action that could be used in one or more Workflow Rules (or other tools), and pointed an Email Template to an Object (for merge fields) and one or more recipients. While this was handy, it was quite inflexible and belongs where it is today – in the past.

Over the years, we’ve seen the introduction of Flow Builder and the passing of Cloud Flow Designer. Flow Builder includes the ability to use built-in or custom Actions (also known as Apex Actions), and one such Action is the Send Email Action. 

We’ve seen countless iterations of this tool in recent releases; Summer ‘23 brought with it the ability to save an email directly against a record in the Activity Timeline, and more recently, in Spring ‘25, we can now send attachments using Send Email too. 

The ability to use attachments in the Send Email action was a big omission that many have turned to third-party Actions like the one from UnofficialSF.

Send Email is a lot more flexible than the legacy Email Alerts functionality because it allows you to configure it within each individual automation, and gives a lot more flexibility in terms of what it can do. 

Email Alerts previously allowed you to only send to a specified, hard-coded email or an email directly relating to a primary record. Additionally, it required an Email Template to be built and specified. 

How Send Email Can Add Value To Your Business

I think the value of the Send Email action speaks for itself – you can send an email from within a Flow! However, it’s got a lot more going on under the hood than you might expect. For example, you can configure a Flow to be displayed in the Activity Timeline on a Salesforce record from within the Send Email action. 

You’re able to add a threading token to the email body to automatically link future responses to that email to a related record (for example, a Case record). You can even construct attachments within your Flow and send them using the Send Email action.

Some of these functions were not always possible with the Send Email action, and in the past, required you to handle this manually or use a third-party option. The constant ongoing enhancements that Salesforce is making to the Send Email tool show that it is something worth investigating, understanding, and likely putting to use within your organization.

The Send Email Action In Action

Setting up and configuring the email action in Flow doesn’t take much effort, and it’s great to understand not only the basics but also some of the advanced features that are available to you. The Summer ‘25 release brought a number of changes to the Send Email action, including a major overhaul of the way you configure the properties of the action. You configure three groups of properties in the Send Email action now:

• Configure Recipient Details
• Configure Sender Details
• Configure Email Content

Previously, all the properties of the action were in a single list, making it difficult to easily find what you were looking for. Segmenting the properties into the three key pieces of an email makes a lot of logical sense. 

Configure Recipient Details

This is where you will configure most of the Recipient properties. Believe it or not, there are still two more properties that you can use to configure recipients if they are records in Salesforce in a different section, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. 

The Recipient Details are broken down into three types: the recipient themselves (the ‘To’ field in a regular email), then the CC and BCC recipients (‘CC’ and ‘BCC’ fields in a regular email). 

The List properties require a single text variable with each email separated by a comma (ie. tim@abc.com,tim@xyz.com,tim@123.com), whereas the Collection properties require a collection variable with multiple email addresses in it.  

Configure Sender Details

The Sender section is composed of only two fields, the Sender Type and the Sender Email Address. Sender Type can be either CurrentUser, DefaultWorkflowUser, or OrgWideEmailAddress, depending on the circumstances of the send. 

The Sender Email Address is required only when the Sender Type is set to OrgWideEmailAddress. This allows you to specify exactly which Org-Wide Email Address you want to send from. 

Configure Email Content

Here we come to the crux of the Send Email action – the Email Content properties. This section was given the largest overhaul in the Summer ‘25 update, as previously, you didn’t have a WYSIWYG editor to construct the Body of your email, nor the ability to add a Collection of Attachment Ids. 

Just to make this even more complex, there are actually two variants of this grouping of properties that you can select from at the top: Compose Email Content and Use Email Template.

That being said, there are a few pieces that are consistent regardless of your selection (this includes those additional recipient properties that I mentioned before):

• Attachment ID: a comma-separated list of Attachment Ids.
• Attachment ID Collection: multiple Attachment Ids in a collection.
• Recipient ID: the Id of a Lead, Contact, or Person Account that you want to send this email to. This is required if you’re using an Email Template, and is also required if Log Email On Send is checked.
• Related Record ID: the Id of another record that you’d like this Email to be related to in Salesforce once sent. Notably, this is not a Lead, Contact, or Person Account – these must be in the Recipient Id. 

Compose Email Content

If you select Compose Email Content, you’ll also see the following properties:

• Subject: The subject line of your email.
• Body: A WYSIWYG editor that allows you to construct the Body of your email in rich text format.
• Rich-Text Formatted Body: If you’ve already created your Body and have it stored in a Text Template, you can provide the Text Template here instead of rebuilding it in the field above.
• Use Line Breaks: A true or false value that defines whether or not to render the line breaks in your Rich-Text Formatted Body Text Template.
• Log Email on Send: a true or false value that determines whether or not you want to log the email against the recipient when you send it. This is only displayed if you’ve populated the Recipient ID property.

Use Email Template

If you want to use an existing Email Template, the four fields mentioned in the above Compose Email section are hidden, and instead, you will just need to provide the Email Template Id that you wish to use. 

Example Simple Screen Flow

Here’s a very quick example of how you can use Flow variables to populate the Send Email Action, rather than hard-coding your email template. To build out this simple Screen Flow will require a single Screen Element and the Send Email Action. 

I’ve placed three simple components on the Screen:

• To (Email Recipient): This is an Email Component.
• Subject: This is a Text component.
• Body: This is a Long Text component.

I’ve also removed the Previous and Pause buttons, and changed the label of Next/Finish to ‘Send Email’, although this is more of a nice touch than a requirement. 

Finally, in the Send Email Action, I’ve specified the following:

In the Configure Recipient Details section, I’ve passed through the Email value to the Recipient Address List property ({!ToEmail.value}. It’s worth noting that your variable name may be slightly different.

Then in the Configure Email Content section, I’ve passed through the Subject and Body that I captured in the Screen Element {!Subject} and {!Body}. Again, yours may be slightly different.

Finally, I’ve activated the Flow and added it to my Utility Bar for easy access.

And that’s it! For this example, I’ve opted not to do anything too advanced as the intent was to demonstrate the functionality of the Action and how you can use merge fields to populate the properties of the Action, but you could extend this if you wanted to. 

For example, you could offer a Checkbox component on the Screen entitled Log Email Against Recipient?, which then displays a Lookup to a Lead, Contact, or Person Account. You can use the Checkbox value to populate the Log Email On Send Property, and the Id of the Lookup field as the Recipient Id. 

Considerations When Using the Send Email Action

Salesforce lists four key considerations in their help documentation, but there are a few additional things you should consider in addition to these. A summary of Salesforce’s considerations are as follows:

1. My Email Settings email signatures are not available for use with the Send Email action. You’ll need to directly inject an email signature somewhere in your Flow (in the email template, a flow text template, or another method) before using the Send Email action to ensure it’s included.
2. Customer Community users can’t create EmailMessage records when the Related Record Id parameter in the Send Email action is set to a Case Id.
3. When debugging in Rollback mode, emails are not sent. Probably for the best.
4. The absolute largest that an email can be is 35 MB. This includes attachments, so be careful here. The Flow will fail if the email is any larger than this.

Some additional considerations that you should keep in mind when using the Send Email action are listed below:

• When using the Attachment Id parameter on the Send Email action, you’ll need to keep in mind that this only works with a comma-separated text variable. Unfortunately, if you’ve gathered your attachment Ids together in a collection variable, you’ll need to convert these to a single string before attaching through the action.
• Similar to the above, the CC and BCC Recipient Address List parameters only support a comma-separated single text variable as well. 
• For the Log Email on Send to work, you’ll need to specify the Recipient Id. This means that the Lead, Contact, or Person Account specified will receive a copy of the email, and it will be logged in their Activity Timeline in Salesforce.
  • Unfortunately, if you need to send an email about someone but not directly to them (for example, a doctor sending a referral about a patient to a specialist; an employer sending an email about an employee to HR), this functionality will not work and you cannot use the Related Record ID property to achieve this either. You will need to build a custom solution or use another record, like a Case, as an intermediary. 

Final Thoughts 

The way we automate the sending of emails from within Salesforce has changed so much over the years, and even in the Summer ‘25 release, we’ve seen some major improvements to the Send Email Action in Salesforce Flow. Having the flexibility to construct our email body within a Flow means we can pull from multiple related or non-related records and merge all these fields together to construct very complex emails and convey a full story for our customers. 

I wonder how the Send Email action will evolve in the future. Will we see the ability to send more emails, specifically using this send method? Perhaps we’ll see A/B Testing come to the Send Email Action in the future – this is something I’d personally love to see. 

I’d love to hear some feedback about how you’re using the Send Email Action in your business. Please feel free to share your stories below!