Over the past 15 years, Salesforce has released three iterations of native email tracking solutions, each of which has not completely solved the problem for users.

This gap has led me to explore alternatives for logging inbound and outbound emails effectively.

In addition to assessing Salesforce's native options - Einstein Activity Capture, Salesforce Inbox, and Email to Salesforce - I also examined two third-party solutions: Apollo.io and Trail Mail (a free App Exchange Product).

My findings are summarized in the following infographic:
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If you want to see me cover these in more detail, checkout the video below:
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The rest of this article will cover each solution that I looked at and their respective pros and cons. I've included some additional "how-to" examples, on how to log emails using Salesforce Inbox and Apollo.

I've also included some extracts from the original Reddit conversion on r/salesforce, feel free to chime in if you have questions or insight to share.

Einstein Activity Capture

• Pros: Fully automated, capturing all emails and activities.
• Cons: The data logged is not accessible to backend Salesforce users, which limits its functionality for integrated system use.

Salesforce Inbox

• Pros: Data logged is accessible to backend Salesforce users. Good enough user interface.
• Cons: Lacks automatic email logging, potentially affecting its adoption.
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Email to Salesforce

• Pros: Data logged is accessible to backend Salesforce users.
• Cons: It’s not user-friendly because it requires manually CC'ing lengthy, complex email addresses for logging. Not automated.

Apollo.io

• Pros: Apollo offers full automation and backend data accessibility. Includes lots of additional functionality.
• Cons: Additional costs are involved, which may not make them the ideal solution for everyone.
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Trail Mail

• Pros: Free AppExchange Solution, offers full automation and backend data accessibility.
• Cons: Email specific, does not include tracking for meetings.

Conclusion

In an ideal world there’s a native solution that’s fully automated, and is accessible to backend users for further automation / data analysis.

Which is why I currently lean more towards using a 3rd party solution.

Initially I was using Apollo, but have recently started using Trail Mail because the way it inserts email data is slightly cleaner.

Salesforce just needs to make a few changes to Einstein Activity Capture, namely make it sync with the Task/Activity object - not just on the front end.

If they just did that we would not be having this conversation in the first place.

I am surprised Salesforce hasn't got to this yet.

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