Einstein Activity Capture connects a user’s mailbox and calendar to Salesforce and shows the emails and meetings on the activity timeline. Most of that data is not stored in Salesforce objects. It lives in a Salesforce-managed store outside your org, it is not in your Task and Event tables, and so it is not in your reports, your SOQL, your triggers or your backups. Turn it on with that understood, or do not turn it on.
What it does
A user connects their Microsoft or Google account. From then on, emails to and from known contacts and leads, plus calendar events, are captured and matched to records by email address. The timeline on Account, Contact, Lead and Opportunity shows them alongside real activity records.
The appeal is real. Reps stop logging emails by hand, coverage goes from partial to near complete, and the timeline reflects what happened.
Where the data actually lives
Captured emails and events are held in a store Salesforce operates outside your org’s database. The timeline reads from it through a component. Nothing is written to Task or Event for those items.
That single architectural fact produces every consequence people complain about:
- Not queryable. There is no SOQL against captured emails. An integration reading activity finds nothing new.
- Not reportable. Standard activity reports read Task and Event. A report on activities per rep will show the ones typed in by hand and miss the captured ones entirely.
- No automation. No triggers, no record-triggered flows, no roll-up fields, no validation, no sharing rules.
- Not in your backup. A data export or a backup tool covers the objects in your org. This is not one of them.
- Retention is bounded. Captured data is kept for a period tied to the licence and then ages out. It is not a permanent archive of your correspondence, and it is not straightforward to extract before it goes.
Turning a user’s connection off removes their captured data from the timeline. There is no conversion step that writes it into Task records on the way out.
Activity Metrics, the partial answer
Salesforce’s response to the reporting gap is Activity Metrics, which writes summary records into your org that you can report on. It gives you fields such as last email date, last inbound and outbound dates, and counts, on the parent records.
Enable it. It is the difference between no activity reporting and coarse activity reporting, and the fields it maintains cover the questions managers actually ask: when did we last speak to this account, and is anyone touching this opportunity.
What it does not give you is the activity itself. You can report that an account had eleven emails last month. You cannot report on their subjects, filter by them, or drive a process from them. Anything needing content or per-record logic still needs real records.
Deciding
Use Einstein Activity Capture when the goal is visibility. Reps and managers want to see the correspondence on the record without anyone logging it. That is a good goal and this is a good tool for it.
Do not use it as the activity data layer for anything that matters downstream. If your renewal model counts touches, if your health score reads activity, if a warehouse pulls activity nightly, if compliance needs email retained for years, then captured activity is the wrong foundation. Those need Task and Event records, which means either manual logging, or an integration that writes real records, or Salesforce Inbox-style save actions where the user chooses what gets kept.
What works in practice is capture for visibility plus deliberate logging for what counts. Reps see everything, and the handful of interactions that drive process get saved as records on purpose. That sounds like duplication. It is a separation between a feed and a system of record.
Sharing, which is its own decision
EAC has its own sharing setting for captured activity, separate from your org-wide defaults. The options range from private to visible to everyone, and the default is not what your security model says. A rep’s personal correspondence being visible org-wide is a conversation to have before go-live rather than after.
Frequently asked
Does it create EmailMessage records? No. EmailMessage comes from Email-to-Case and from emails sent through Salesforce, not from capture.
Can I migrate captured data into Task records? Not through a supported feature. Treat the captured store as read-only and temporary.
Does it update Last Activity Date? The Activity Metrics fields are the reliable ones to read. Do not assume the standard LastActivityDate reflects captured items.
What happened to Lightning Sync? It was retired, and Einstein Activity Capture is the successor for contact and event synchronisation. Orgs still running old sync configurations should check they are not relying on something that no longer runs.
