Want to Streamline Communications you Receive from Salesforce? Here’s how!

As a Salesforce admin, you receive a lot of email from Salesforce, but also need to stay in the loop and have the latest information close at hand that impacts your orgs. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to manage email preferences for admin communications. Well, I have great news for you! You can now manage the transactional admin communications you receive from Salesforce, including whether or not to receive Product & Service and Security Notifications.

If you’re thinking about reading this post and immediately turning off these notifications, you should think again. Receiving these notifications is critical so that you can prepare for changes that may impact your organization, or so that you can be made aware of possible or verified suspicious activity in your org(s). If you choose to opt-out from receiving these notices, we encourage you to ensure there is another administrator of your Salesforce org who will receive them and address any actions required on behalf of your company.

Product and Service Notifications are a totally different beast than Marketing emails. Product & Service Notifications are designed to alert you of any changes to features, functionality, or service that may impact your use of Salesforce. These notifications may include actions administrators must take in order to prepare for these changes. Marketing Communications preferences are managed separately, and you can manage your preferences for those emails here.

Exciting news, so how do I do this?

To manage your preferences for transactional admin communications, just log into the Help & Training portal, click on My Settings, and look for the Notification Preferences tab. Click the corresponding check box to select which notifications you’d like to receive.

Product & Service Notifications include:

• Product Behavior Changes
• Service Maintenance
• Feature Retirements
• End-of-Support & End-of-Pilot
• Major Release Reminders
• Off-Cycle Release Notifications (outside of the 24-hr standard release window)
• Security Notifications

There are three types of Security Notifications sent by Salesforce:

• Security Advisory – A broadly distributed notification about a security issue relevant to all Salesforce customers. These non customer-specific advisories will include our statement on things like Heartbleed and POODLE.
• Security Alert – A customer-specific notification about possible suspicious activity involving your Salesforce instance that requires further investigation by your organization.
• Security Incident – A customer-specific notification about a confirmed or reasonably suspected breach of data hosted on Salesforce.

Any Salesforce user can sign up to receive Security Advisories, while only administrators can sign up for Security Alert and Security Incident notifications. An administrator is defined by Salesforce as any user with a profile that has the “Manage Users” and “Modify all Data” permissions enabled. We recommend reviewing periodically who in your organization has these two permissions enabled. Take the example of Security Alerts and Incidents. There are very few individuals who should be privy to this information at your company. Limiting the number of people with the “Manage Users” and “Modify all Data” is therefore the most prudent approach.

Learn more

For more information on the type of information included in these notifications, please see the What are Product and Service Notifications? Knowledge article. If you have more questions about how to manage your Notification Preferences in Help & Training, please see the How to Manage your Notification Preferences in Help & Training Knowledge article or open a case via the Help & Training portal.