The emails were in Salesforce all along. Nobody could see them.

TL;DR: Logging an email into Salesforce and being able to see it later are two different things, and the gap between them fails silently. One business found roughly 1,600 logged emails missing from its account timelines, discovered only because a diligent team member was leaving and checked the trail she was handing over. The records still existed, which is the good news. But the window for an easy fix was already closing. The time to check your records is while nothing is wrong.

Last week I sat in on a conversation with a business that had made an uncomfortable discovery. Someone on the team, diligent, organised, the kind of person who logs every email to Salesforce before pressing send, was leaving at the end of the month. While getting everything in order for handover, she noticed that emails she knew she had logged were no longer showing on the account timelines. Not one or two. When she dug in with Salesforce support, the count came to around 1,600 logged emails missing from view, stretching back over six months.

Here is the twist. The emails weren't gone. Support confirmed they still existed in the system. The link that makes each one appear on an account's activity timeline had broken, so the records were there, but anyone opening an account would never know it.

The conventional view

Most teams treat email logging as a storage problem. You connect Outlook or Gmail to Salesforce, you log as you go, and the record-keeping takes care of itself. Logged means saved, and saved means safe.

To be fair, that holds most of the time. Email integrations are mature, and the habit of logging is exactly the right habit to build. Nobody in this story did anything wrong.

The challenge

A record you can't see fails in exactly the same way as a record you never created. If a colleague opens that account tomorrow and the last six months of correspondence aren't on the timeline, it makes no difference to them whether the emails are missing or merely invisible. Storage was never the promise that mattered. Retrieval is.

And visibility failures are silent. No error message appeared. No alert fired. Nothing was deleted, so nothing looked deleted. Salesforce doesn't fail due to technology — it fails due to drift, and this is what drift looks like at the level of a single record: a link quietly breaks, the timeline quietly thins out, and everyone carries on assuming the system is telling them the whole story.

The strategic truth

When something like this surfaces, there are two possible diagnoses, and they are worlds apart. Either the records were never captured, in which case you are rebuilding history by hand, or they were captured and have become invisible. The second is a far better place to be. As I said on the call: the fact that the emails are in there is good, because it means you can do something about it.

But the clock matters more than most people realise. In this case, some of the supporting data needed to repair the links is only retained for a limited period, roughly 30 days. Every week of not noticing shrinks the range of fixes available. A problem caught early is a repair job; the same problem caught late can become a permanent gap in your records.

Why this matters to your business

Your CRM is your institutional memory. When someone leaves, and someone always eventually leaves, the activity timeline is often the handover. It's how the next person picks up a relationship without starting from zero, and it's how the business proves what was said and when.

It also underpins trusted reporting. Any report built on activity, when an account was last contacted, how engaged a customer is, which relationships have gone quiet, is quietly wrong if the activity isn't all visible. And confidence erodes fast: the first time someone spots a gap they know shouldn't be there, they start doubting everything else the system shows them. That doubt is harder to repair than the data.

What to do about it

You don't need a project to check this. Pick five accounts you know well and read the timeline against your own sent folder: does the system show what you know happened? Ask whoever owns Salesforce in your business when anyone last verified that logged activity actually displays. Treat any "that's odd, I'm sure I logged that" as a signal rather than a one-off, because by the time one person notices, the gap is rarely one record wide.

And if something does look off, resist the urge to patch the symptom. Establish what is actually wrong first, whether records are missing or merely unlinked, how far back it goes, and what is still recoverable. The diagnosis determines everything about the fix, and ongoing ownership of the system is what stops the same quiet break reopening six months later.

The moment of truth comes whether you choose it or not

The worst time to discover you can't trust your records is the moment you need them: a handover, a renewal conversation, a dispute. The business in this story caught the problem in time because one person cared enough to check before walking out of the door. You don't have to wait for a leaving date to do the same.

If you're not confident your timelines are telling you the whole story, the honest first step is establishing what's actually going on — before anyone proposes fixes. That's exactly what The Salesforce Reset is for: 60 minutes, £2,500, and written findings you can act on. Book a Reset.