Definition
Email Delivery Settings is a Setup page that controls how Salesforce delivers outbound emails, including bounce management, email relay configuration, and compliance settings. Administrators can configure email relay to route outbound emails through their organization's email server for additional security scanning and archiving.
Real-World Example
The IT admin at Apex Dynamics configures Email Delivery Settings to enable email relay through the company's Exchange server. All outbound emails from Salesforce now route through the corporate mail server, which applies DLP scanning, adds a legal disclaimer footer, and archives messages in the company's compliance system before delivering them to recipients.
Why Email Delivery Settings Matters
Email Delivery Settings is the control panel for how Salesforce sends outbound emails, covering critical infrastructure decisions like email relay configuration, bounce management, and compliance controls. The most impactful setting is email relay, which routes all outbound Salesforce emails through your organization's own mail server before they reach recipients. This enables corporate security scanning, data loss prevention (DLP), legal disclaimer insertion, and email archiving, all things that regulated industries and security-conscious organizations require.
As organizations grow and email volume increases, properly configured Email Delivery Settings become the difference between reliable, compliant email communication and a chaotic mess of bounced messages and compliance violations. Without email relay, outbound messages bypass corporate security controls, potentially exposing sensitive data. Without bounce management, sales teams continue emailing invalid addresses, damaging sender reputation and deliverability. Organizations in regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and legal that fail to configure these settings risk audit findings, because there is no central archive of outbound Salesforce communications.
How Organizations Use Email Delivery Settings
- Apex Dynamics — Apex Dynamics configured Email Delivery Settings to relay all outbound Salesforce emails through their Exchange server. Every email now passes through DLP scanning that catches accidentally included Social Security numbers, receives a legal disclaimer footer, and is archived in their compliance system. This configuration passed their SOC 2 audit on the first review.
- Clearview Healthcare — Clearview Healthcare enabled bounce management in Email Delivery Settings to automatically track hard bounces on patient communication emails. When an email bounces, the Contact record is flagged and excluded from future sends. This reduced their bounce rate from 4.2% to 0.3% over three months and prevented their Salesforce IP from being blacklisted.
- Ironclad Manufacturing — Ironclad Manufacturing uses Email Delivery Settings to restrict outbound emails to only approved domains during their sandbox testing phase. This prevents test emails from accidentally reaching real customers while still allowing the QA team to verify email functionality by sending to internal addresses only.