enabling email on records in lex

enabling email on records in lex is not what i imagined spending much time on in our migration…but here we are.

if you are in a sandbox, deliverability must be set to all email, else the action wont show up on any records period.

you need to add the sendemail action to the global publisher layouts, or override the specific page layouts to include it. makes sense.

per this doc, the send email action only works in lex but must be in the classic actions section also. some mumbo jumbo about inheritance. just tested and indeed it is the way. just dont ask.

once you finally get it to show up on the page, you may get a big red error message when you try to actually use it. has happened to me more than once! try disabling and re-enabling enhanced email per this thread on success. again, just dont ask.

you can indeed customize the layout for the email action. I removed relatedTo from the send email action layout, and the email is still related to the object from where the email was sent. generally relatedTo is only useful when sending from leads/contacts where you can related to another record - if sending an email from an account, opp, campaign, custom object, etc, then relatedTo should usually be the record you are sending from, and so save some space and remove that (create a separate email action for contact and lead if you want it visible there).

you also might think to try to save some space by eliminating the ‘from’ field (if users do not use org wide addresses)…but then the layout gets a bit off…off enough to be not worth it.

still not sure about quick text vs lightning email templates. quick text uses salesforce merge syntax instead of handlebars..ok, nothing major. quick text can be used in more than emails - chats, events, tasks, knowledge articles, social posts…interesting..so far the main thing i can see is that email templates include a subject and quick text does not. maybe that is it as far as sending email goes.

in my sandbox only event and task were available as channels for quick text. i manually added email and it worked, but uhh. yeah. i guess that is how you do it in an old org…

and you can now use classic email templates in lightning so that is cool. i can only see that option in prod and not in sandbox…so yeah that too.