Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) is a Salesforce feature that automatically syncs emails, calendar events, and contacts between Salesforce and your connected Microsoft or Google email account. Instead of manually logging every client email or meeting in Salesforce, EAC pulls that activity data in automatically and attaches it to the relevant records, giving sales teams a more complete picture of customer interactions without extra data entry.
What EAC Actually Does
EAC connects to your work email and performs three core functions: capturing emails, syncing calendar events, and keeping contacts up to date. Each works slightly differently.
Emails: Messages you send and receive are captured and saved in Salesforce as email message and task records. The system automatically links them to the activity timeline of related accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, contracts, and quotes. So if a sales rep emails a prospect, that conversation shows up on the prospect’s Salesforce record without anyone having to copy, paste, or click “log activity.”
Calendar events: Your calendar syncs between Salesforce and your Microsoft or Google calendar. Meeting data is saved as event records in Salesforce, appears in the Salesforce calendar, and gets linked to related contact and lead records.
Contacts: Contact syncing runs in both directions. When you first connect your email account, EAC scans it and creates Salesforce records for contacts that don’t already exist. Going forward, whenever you send an email or add a calendar event, EAC checks for new contact data and creates or updates records accordingly.
Supported Email Providers
EAC works with three email environments. All connections use the OAuth 2.0 protocol for authorization.
- Google Workspace: Supports Basic, Business, and Enterprise editions. You can connect at the user level or through the Google Marketplace App.
- Microsoft Office 365: Supports tenants hosted on Microsoft Azure global infrastructure clouds. Azure national and government clouds are not supported. If your organization set up EAC with Office 365 before Spring 2026, you need to upgrade to the Microsoft Graph API by August 2026, since Microsoft is retiring Exchange Web Services (EWS) for Office 365 in October 2026.
- Microsoft Exchange (on-premises): Supports Exchange 2019, 2016, or 2013. Your Exchange admin needs to enable EWS on an SSL connection and ensure the server supports Basic Authentication. Hybrid deployments are not supported.
Free vs. Paid Editions
Salesforce includes a standard version of EAC at no extra cost with many Sales Cloud licenses. A more full-featured version comes bundled with products like Sales Cloud Einstein, Inbox, and Sales Engagement, or can be purchased as an add-on. The differences are meaningful, especially around data retention and analytics.
Data retention is the biggest gap. The standard edition stores captured activity data for 3 to 6 months. The paid version stores up to 24 months by default and can be extended to 5 years. Once the retention period passes, the data is permanently deleted from the system. However, contacts and events that were fully synced to native Salesforce records (not just captured) are not affected by this deletion.
Analytics differ substantially too. The standard edition gives you a read-only Activities Dashboard covering 90 days of data. The paid version provides 180 days of dashboard data, access through Analytics Studio, and the ability to use the analytics API. The paid edition also unlocks Activity 360 Reporting and Activity Metrics, which are not available at all in the standard version.
A few other features are exclusive to the paid tiers. Einstein Email Insights, which surfaces AI-generated suggestions on emails, is off by default in the standard edition and doesn’t support custom insights. In the paid version, it’s on by default for all EAC users with full customization. Recommended Connections, which suggest people you should add to your network in Salesforce based on email patterns, are only available in the paid edition as well.
Where EAC Data Lives
This is one of the most important things to understand about EAC, and it catches many teams off guard. Captured email and event data is not stored in Salesforce’s standard database. It’s stored externally on AWS infrastructure. That means you cannot run standard Salesforce reports on captured emails and events the way you would on other Salesforce records like tasks or opportunities.
Instead, you need to use Analytics Studio (Tableau CRM) for reporting on EAC data. This is a different reporting environment than the native Salesforce report builder most admins are familiar with. For organizations that rely heavily on activity reporting, this can be a significant workflow change. Synced contacts and calendar events that create or update native Salesforce records are reportable through standard tools, but the captured email data specifically lives in that external storage layer.
How Setup Works
A Salesforce admin enables EAC in Setup and configures which users or groups should have their accounts connected. The admin also defines sync settings: which direction contacts sync, whether emails are captured for all contacts or only those matching existing records, and how calendar events are handled.
Individual users then connect their email accounts through their Salesforce settings. Once connected, EAC begins scanning the email account and syncing data automatically. There’s no ongoing manual work required from the user after the initial connection.
Admins can also set up exclusion lists to prevent certain email addresses or domains from being captured. This is useful for filtering out personal emails, internal communications, or sensitive contacts that shouldn’t appear in Salesforce records.
Who Benefits Most From EAC
EAC is designed primarily for sales teams, though anyone who tracks customer or prospect communication in Salesforce can benefit. Sales reps get the most obvious value: their email conversations and meetings automatically appear on the right records, which means managers and teammates can see the full history of a deal without asking “did anyone log that call?”
Sales managers benefit from the analytics dashboards, which show activity volume and engagement patterns across the team. This data can reveal which deals are going quiet, which reps are most active, and where pipeline coverage might be thin.
The tradeoff is that EAC works best when your team uses a supported email provider consistently and when your Salesforce data hygiene is solid. If contact records are messy or duplicated, EAC may link activities to the wrong records or create duplicate contacts during its initial scan. Clean data going in produces much better results coming out.