Definition
Send through External Email Services is a Setup feature that allows organizations to route outbound emails from Salesforce through an external email service like Amazon SES or SendGrid instead of Salesforce's built-in email servers. This provides greater control over email deliverability, tracking, and compliance.
Real-World Example
The admin at Summit Retail configures Send through External Email Services to route all outbound Salesforce emails through their Amazon SES account. This gives the email marketing team access to SES's advanced bounce handling, reputation monitoring, and delivery analytics, while maintaining the ability to send emails directly from Salesforce records.
Why Send through External Email Services Matters
Send through External Email Services is a Salesforce Setup feature that allows organizations to route outbound emails through an external email service provider like Amazon SES, SendGrid, or Mailgun instead of using Salesforce's built-in email servers. This configuration provides organizations with greater control over email deliverability, sender reputation, bounce handling, and compliance. Salesforce's native email sending works well for moderate volumes, but organizations sending high volumes or requiring advanced email analytics often need the specialized capabilities that dedicated email service providers offer.
As organizations scale their email communications, relying solely on Salesforce's built-in email infrastructure can become limiting. Shared sending IPs, daily sending limits, and basic bounce handling may not meet the needs of organizations sending hundreds of thousands of emails. External email services provide dedicated IP addresses, sophisticated reputation monitoring, advanced analytics, and compliance features like DKIM and DMARC alignment. Without this capability, organizations risk email deliverability issues where messages land in spam folders, damage to sender reputation from poor bounce handling, and inability to meet regulatory requirements for email tracking and auditability.
How Organizations Use Send through External Email Services
- Summit Retail — Summit Retail configures Send through External Email Services to route all outbound Salesforce emails through Amazon SES. This gives their marketing team access to SES's advanced bounce handling, reputation monitoring, and delivery analytics while keeping the ability to send emails directly from Salesforce records and workflows.
- Meridian Financial Group — Meridian routes transactional emails through SendGrid to ensure regulatory compliance. SendGrid's detailed delivery logs satisfy their audit requirements, and dedicated IP addresses prevent their critical financial notifications from being affected by shared IP reputation issues on Salesforce's default servers.
- Apex Software Inc. — Apex Software uses an external email service to handle their high-volume automated notifications, sending over 50,000 emails daily from Salesforce workflow alerts and Flow-triggered messages. The external service's infrastructure handles this volume reliably while providing real-time bounce and complaint processing back into Salesforce.