Ultimate Guide to Einstein Activity Capture: Sync Email as Activity and More

Sales, service, and virtually all customer-facing teams within an organization are bound to use their email and calendar to communicate with customers and prospects, schedule meetings, and ultimately work towards a great customer experience. While emails can be directly sent from Salesforce – logging them as an activity – how can everything else that doesn’t happen directly within the CRM be brought in to paint the full picture? 

In this post, we’ll go through how your Outlook and Gmail data can be synced with Salesforce records to enhance collaboration – without having to change the team’s way of working. 

What Is Einstein Activity Capture? 

As the name suggests, this product is meant to capture all relevant activities and contacts from your users’ email and calendar providers, such as Gmail and Outlook, to provide visibility directly within Salesforce records. 

While the tool can be used by anyone in the organization who exchanges emails with customers and prospects, it can make the most impact from the get-go across Sales and Business Development teams who work with Leads, Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities day in and day out. 

By using Einstein Activity Capture (EAC), you can remove the silo that emails and calendar meetings can become, while ensuring that the entire team who needs to will get access to more context and information that could have previously been unaccounted for – all within the CRM.

Get Started

Starting your journey with EAC from a Salesforce Admin perspective can be quite fast, and depending on your Salesforce edition and add-on products, it could be expanded to the entire team or only part of it. 

EAC has two versions: Einstein Activity Capture Standard, which is included with Sales Cloud Starter, Professional, and Enterprise Editions, and allows up to 100 users to be enabled. For organizations using Unlimited Edition (UE) or higher, additional licenses are included. Alternatively, add-on products like Sales Engagement can be purchased to unlock full EAC functionality for your org and enable access for all your users. 

Settings and Configurations

After enabling EAC, it’s all about defining the settings and configurations for your organization. While there is a separate Settings page, which we will explore later on, you will be prompted to create a configuration from the get-go and determine how the sync will be performed with the Email and Calendar Service. There are a few authentication options available, including User Level, so make sure to choose the one that best suits your needs.

The Settings page is where you can control most items at the organization level. Another available tab for Einstein Activity Capture is Excluded Addresses, which you can define from the get-go to ensure that any internal domains, for example, won’t be considered for the sync. 

Within the Configuration itself, there are plenty of settings to choose from: whether Events, Emails, Contacts, or all of them should be synced; how far back the sync should go in days to bring the information in, and more. 

Additionally, the Configuration is where you will determine which individual users and profiles the settings should be applied to, including what data will be captured and for which users. However, this doesn’t mean that the permission set is not needed, so the user has to have the Einstein Activity Capture Included permission set assigned and also be part of a Configuration.

The User Experience

After finalizing the initial setup and assigning one of the available permission sets to your users, it’s time for them to get started by connecting their email and calendar. This step has to be performed by the individual users if user-level authentication has been chosen in order to connect their Salesforce account to the email and calendar service, and it’s only a one-time thing. 

Users can always go back into their settings to edit the privacy options, but those options will also see significant changes in this release – this means that additional enablement will be needed to ensure users are comfortable with the new options following the transition.  

Einstein Email Insights

Found on a separate Setup page under Einstein Activity Capture, Einstein Email Insights allows you, as an administrator, to enable an option for users to see bespoke insights directly within records and on the Activity Timelines, derived from the contents of the email. 

There are quite a few out-of-the-box insights available, such as Commitment Made, which will highlight a follow-up being promised, but you can also create custom ones based on keywords of your choosing. Up to 10 custom insights can be created, and these can be combined with one or more standard ones if desired. 

Sync Email as Activity in EAC

These features and capabilities came with Summer ‘25 (a significant release for EAC indeed!) and are now the baseline for how EAC works.

Settings

Organizations sync emails as Salesforce Activities from the setup screen, which unlocks Activities-table visibility, API access, automations, and reporting.

There’s no option to skip capturing emails and events as activities: both can be found in the Activities table and follow standard sharing rules just like any other task or event.

Matching is handled through Salesforce Flow (more on that below), and there’s an option to exclude certain email types from capture altogether, such as automated messages like out-of-office replies, or anything containing sensitive content.

Configurations

The Advanced Settings tab within the Configuration is also seeing a significant change, especially related to the new privacy options. The Header-Only Email Capture feature provides enhanced security and privacy while also creating a record to highlight that communication did happen with a certain Lead or Contact, for example. 

With Header-Only Capture, users can choose not to store the subject and body in Salesforce. This also applies to internal and blocked emails, which will no longer be stored on AWS if the intention is for these to not be synced at all. 

Use Flow to Match Records

Record matching runs through Salesforce Flow, giving admins more control over the matching criteria and which records activities match to. There is an out-of-the-box “Activities: Match Email to Records” flow that can retrieve recipients and then match progressively (Leads and Contacts first, then Accounts and Opportunities) before updating the activity. It’s also customizable if the default Apex actions and setup don’t cover your matching logic.

EAC record matching has been done a certain way for a long time, and while the traditional mechanism worked as intended, Salesforce customers found they needed more control over the matching mechanism, including the criteria and which records the activities match to. Having the entire process in a Flow makes it easily accessible and highly customizable, especially if the out-of-the-box Apex actions and setup are not enough.

As for orgs that work with Partners, there’s an option to flag this in the matching process and add field-based criteria for how Partner Accounts are identified.

Activity Timeline and Email Message

The Activity Timeline experience itself is largely unchanged from the way it’s always been, with activities selectable and previewable, and the filter for activities with Insights still works the same way.

If the email subject and body are set to header-only (by the admin or the user), the record displays as [No subject] on the timeline so it’s easy to identify at a glance.

Emails synced through EAC use the standard Email Message UI, and users with access can open an email to see the body (unless header-only is set), subject, and recipients. Attachments aren’t captured, so that related list stays empty. Like other activities, the Related To list pulls from the WhatId field – a standard or custom object, whatever fits your setup.

Analytics

Because EAC reuses the Email Message entity, any Custom Report Type you’ve already built on that object works for EAC emails too. To see the full activity history for a record (like one account, for example), the standard activity-related report types work, since every email message has an associated task.

The Email Insights object is also exposed for reporting via Custom Report Type, though the available fields are still fairly basic.

The Unified Activities object, on the other hand, is discontinued for emails and meetings (it remains available for calls synced through Einstein Conversation Insights). For larger or enterprise-level orgs, this also removed the old Activity 360 record-count ceiling and opened up public API access to pull activity data into external tools like Power BI.

Storage Impact Since Spring ‘26

One thing that has changed in Spring ‘26 is that Sync Email as Activity is no longer optional.

As of Spring ‘26, Salesforce automatically enables Sync Email as Activity for all new orgs setting up EAC, and for any existing EAC org that doesn’t already have email sync turned on. Once it’s on, every synced email becomes an Email Message / Task record in your org. And unlike the old AWS-hosted approach, that data now counts against your Salesforce data storage limit just like any other record.