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 user’s 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, but since there will be significant changes following the Summer ‘25 release, you won’t see these exact items anymore. Instead, you’ll see the new version, which we’ll deep dive into. 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.
What’s New in Summer ‘25
Summer ‘25 is an exciting release across the entire Salesforce product suite, with many new features as well as enhancements ready for customers to enjoy. Einstein Activity Capture has seen improvements over past releases as well, but the new additions and architectural changes in Summer ‘25 reflect a significant shift in the approach, with many more options for customers to tailor the tool to their needs. Let’s dive in!
Settings
The new architectural changes for EAC are visible at a glance right from the setup, as organizations can now sync emails as Salesforce Activities. This unlocks a new realm of possibilities for user experience, API access, automations, and, of course, reporting.
Some of the items will remain the same, but you will notice that there is no longer an option to not capture emails and events as activities, as both will be captured within the Activities table and aligned with the standard sharing mechanisms, just like any other task or event. The new settings will be highlighted with a “New” label, so you will certainly spot them immediately.
In addition to this, the matching will now be done using Salesforce Flow, which we’ll cover later in the article. There is also now an option to simply not capture certain email types, such as automated emails like out-of-office replies or any email 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 new 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.
Previously, email capture options included sharing with those who could see matched CRM records or marking emails fully private with no content visibility. 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 not to be synced at all.
Use Flow to Match Records
EAC record matching has been done the same way for a long time, and while it worked as intended, Salesforce customers needed more control over the matching mechanism, including the criteria and which records the activities match to.
Salesforce heard this feedback and overhauled the entire process by moving it into a Flow, which is not only easily accessible but can also be further customized if the out-of-the-box Apex actions and setup are not enough.
The “Activities: Match Email to Records” Flow will be readily available and will first retrieve the recipients, after which the matching will be progressively done for Leads and Contacts, then Accounts and Opportunities, before finally updating the activity.
Another built-in functionality that caters to organizations that use Partners is the option to flag this in the matching process to ensure that the matching is done correctly. If the option is selected, you will be able to add field-based criteria to note how Partner Accounts are identified within the org.
Activity Timeline and Email Message
When it comes to the Activity Timeline, the experience doesn’t see notable changes, as the activity will still be available to select and preview, and of course, all emails and other activities related to the record will appear in this list. The possibility to filter based on activities with Insights is still available as well.
If either the administrator or the user sets the privacy of the email subject and body to header-only, those records will be displayed as [No subject] on the timeline so that they can be easily identified.
Emails synced with EAC following these changes reuse the Email Message UI, which means that by clicking on any email, users with access will be able to review the email body (if header-only was not selected), subject, and, of course, the recipients. Note that attachments are still not captured, so the related list will always be empty.
Similar to other activities, the Related To related list will display the record from the WhatId field, which can be anything you need – like a standard or a custom object.
Analytics
Since the Email Message entity is being reused, this means that if you have already created a Custom Report Type using this object, you and your team can leverage it for reporting on the EAC emails as well. Alternatively, if you would like to review the entire activity from – let’s say – one account, you can always simply use the activities-related report types, as each email message will also have an associated task.
Yet another change coming with this release is that the Email Insights object has been exposed, and you can create a Custom Report Type in order to use it. As of now, the available information is quite basic, but Salesforce is actively working to expand it so that insights will be directly tied to records within Reports as well.
The Unified Activities object, which you may be familiar with from previous iterations of EAC reporting, will be discontinued for emails and meetings. However, it will still be available for calls synced with Einstein Conversation Insights.
For larger, enterprise-level organizations, this change translated into them being able to tap more into Salesforce reporting. Previously, this was not possible for them with Activity 360 if the total number of Accounts, Contracts, Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities exceeded the set limit, which is now no longer a concern. Even more so, customers can take advantage of the public APIs to take the data outside of Salesforce into other tools, such as Power BI.
Considerations
One thing to keep in mind is that, alongside this change, emails are no longer stored in AWS and will impact your Salesforce storage just like any other records not created through EAC. Having a deletion or archival process in place can help ensure you don’t reach the limit or incur additional costs.
While there isn’t a data migration tool available in this release, Salesforce is working towards a migration plan that will be made available to customers. They also plan not to charge for storage related to the migrated data to ease the transition. Stay tuned!
The Summer ’25 changes, including Email as Salesforce Activity, have already been rolled out to sandboxes, with the current timeline for production instances set for mid-July 2025.
Final Thoughts
All these Einstein Activity Capture changes point to the fact that Salesforce has heard the customer feedback and is actively working to revamp both the admin and end-user experience, while ensuring conversational data is accessible directly within the CRM.
If you haven’t tried EAC yet, considering the newly unlocked automation capabilities, control over matching, and more granular reporting, there’s no better time than now – following this release!
