Activities & the timeline

An activity is something a person on your team did about a record — a call made, an email sent, a meeting held, a note worth keeping. It is logged by hand, from the record it is about — or, for an email, written and sent from there — and it sits in one timeline beside everything the platform captured about that person on its own and every campaign email it sent them.

Four kinds of history

A contact's timeline is one newest-first stream drawn from four sources, and every entry says which it is:

Entry	Where it comes from	Who can change it
Captured	The platform recorded it — a form submission, an order, a booking, a member sign-up, a newsletter opt-in, an API or import create, or a contact added by hand. Each carries the door it came through and, for a form, the page the person was on.	Nobody. It is a record of what happened.
Logged	A member of your team logged it — a call, an email, a meeting, a note, or something else.	Its author, or an org-wide member.
Sent	An email the platform sent to this person from their record — by a teammate with Send email, or by an automation's Send an email step. It carries its subject, the address it went to, and where delivery got to. See Sending an email.	Nobody edits what was sent; its author or an org-wide member may delete it.
Campaign	A campaign email the platform delivered to the person — which email, when it went out, and what became of it. See Campaign email on the timeline.	Nobody. It is the delivery record.

A captured entry from this site carries a link to its record: Open submission lands on the Inbox with the reader open on that submission, Open order on the orders list with the order's dialog open, and a booking or a sign-up on the Bookings or Users page. An entry from another site in your workspace — read on that site's console — or one written before the site was stamped on it is shown without a link.

Captured history lives on the contact and is kept to the most recent fifty entries. Logged activity is a collection of its own, bounded at 5,000 entries per record — a call a day for fourteen years, so nobody working a real relationship reaches it, and an automation logging on every event cannot fill one person's log without limit. At the ceiling, Log activity, the Log a CRM activity step and POST /v1/activities refuse another entry on that record and say so; the timeline reads it a hundred entries at a time and reads the next hundred when you page past them. Campaign email is read from the delivery log the moment the page opens, over the newest fifty messages sent to the address.

Reading the timeline

Every entry — on a contact's Timeline, and on the Activity card of a lead, a company or a deal — is a collapsed row, newest first:

• Collapsed, a row shows its kind and its chips (Logged, Received, Sent, the delivery state, how a call went and how long it took), then its subject, or a note's first line, and under it who logged it, to or from whom, and when. An email reads as its subject, its recipient and its time.
• Opened with the chevron at its start, a row shows the rest: an email's body, a note's every line. A row with nothing more to show has no chevron.
• Expand all in the card header opens every row; Collapse all closes them again.
• Edit and Delete stay on the row they act on.

A company's Activity card also says, on each row, who or what it is about: the contact and the deal, each a link to its record. See who, what and which company.

The list is paged ten at a time by the footer under it, the same footer as every list in the console, with a menu for how many rows a page holds.

A logged or sent Email activity and a Campaign entry are different things and are drawn differently: the first is a message somebody on your team wrote, sent or recorded, the second is a mailing the platform sent to an audience the person was in.

A few Note entries are bookkeeping rather than something a person typed, and each is signed by what did it: Filed under and Removed from a campaign, by the member who changed the record's filing — or by Lead conversion, when a lead's campaigns were carried onto the contact it became — and Enrolled in a sequence and stopped, by Sequences. They read on the lead and the contact alike, above the emails they explain.

Campaign email on the timeline

Every campaign email sent to the person from this site — or from a site declared to be one sender with it — appears at the moment it was sent, in one line:

Spring sale · sent · delivered · opened ×2 · clicked

The name is the email as your team named it on Emails › Messages, or its subject when it has no name, and it links to that email's own report. The words after it are the states the email reached, in order: delivered, opened (with a count past one), clicked (likewise), bounced, or marked as spam. The subject line rides under the entry when it differs from the name.

What appears, and what does not:

• Campaigns only. A receipt, a booking confirmation, a password reset or an invite is not on a CRM timeline — those are account mail, sent to the person rather than to an audience.
• Your sites' campaigns only. A contact record is shared by every site in your workspace, and other businesses in the same workspace that mail the same person never see each other's campaigns here. A campaign sent by a sibling site in your own consent group is listed, without a link — that site's Emails console is its own.
• The newest fifty messages to the address are read. Somebody mailed heavily by several sites can have older campaign entries fall past the window.
• Opens and clicks need the delivery webhook. An email sent before it was connected shows as sent and nothing more, the same gap the campaign report itself reports.
• An email your team has deleted keeps its entry, named by the subject the person received, with no report to link to.

The timeline says so when the delivery log could not be read, rather than showing an empty history — the two lead to opposite conclusions about the relationship.

The most recent open or click across all of these is the record's Last engaged stamp, which a re-engagement audience can be built from.

Logging an activity

Open the record — a contact's page under CRM › Contacts, a company's under Companies, a deal's under Deals, or a lead's under Leads — and choose Log activity in the header of the Timeline or Activity card. Name and Related To open on that record, and you can change either one.

Logging an activity is part of the CRM, included from Starter. On Free the CRM is shown locked, so there is no record page to log from.

Field	What it is
Kind	Call, Email, Text message, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, LinkedIn, Meeting, Note or Other — how the conversation happened, so a message on any channel is logged as itself rather than as Other.
Direction	For a call: Outbound (your team placed it), Inbound (they called you) or Internal (a call between teammates about the record) — Salesforce's Call Type. For an email or a message (text, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, LinkedIn): Outbound (you sent it) or Inbound (they wrote to you). Outbound to start; Not said leaves it off.
When	When it happened, which is not always when you are logging it. Defaults to now.
What happened	The body of the entry.
Outcome	For a call or a meeting: how it ended — "left a voicemail", "agreed to a trial".
Minutes	For a call or a meeting: how long it took.
Name	The contact it was with. Opened from a contact, that contact; opened from a deal, the deal's Primary, with everyone on the deal at the top of the list, whatever their contact role.
Related To	The company or the deal it is about. Opened from a company or a deal, that record. The open deals of the contact in Name, and of the company, lead the list.

An entry needs at least one of Name and Related To. A lead's own log offers neither: the entry is filed on the lead, and it moves to the contact when the lead converts.

A call, an email or a message with a direction reads as it in its chip — Inbound call, Outbound email, Internal call, Outbound WhatsApp message. The Log a CRM activity automation step and POST /v1/activities take the same direction (direction), and only on a call, an email or a message.

Each entry shows who logged it and how long ago. The author can edit or delete their own entries; an org-wide member can edit or delete anyone's. A colleague with access to only some of your sites can read an entry they did not write, and cannot change it. Correcting an entry can change its Name and Related To too, and it moves to the timelines they name.

Who, what and which company

An activity can be about a person, a deal and a company at once, the way one is in Salesforce, and it shows on the page of each:

It shows on	When
The contact's Timeline	Name is that contact.
The deal's Activity card	Related To is that deal.
The company's Activity card	Related To is that company, or the entry rolls up to it.

An entry about a deal or a contact rolls up to their company on its own, so a company's page shows what happened with its people and on its deals as well as what was logged on the company itself:

1. A company you chose in Related To stays.
2. Otherwise the entry takes the deal's company.
3. Otherwise it takes the company of the contact in Name, as the site you are logging from has them filed, or as your organization does for a person it added itself.

So a call logged on a deal shows on the deal, on the timeline of the person you spoke to, and on their company. Logged on a contact instead, name one of their open deals in Related To and it shows on the deal too.

The same goes for everything else that writes to a timeline: an automation's entries, emails sent from a record or captured, bookings, entries from Sequences, campaign filings, and POST /v1/activities.

An entry keeps the company it was logged with. When a contact later moves to another company, or a deal changes company, their earlier entries stay where they are; edit an entry's Name or Related To to move it.

A meeting from a booking

A confirmed booking files a meeting on its record's timeline without anyone logging it — titled with the service and the slot, and linked to the booking. The record is the one the booking link was dropped from (a contact's, a lead's or a deal's Book a meeting, or Insert booking link in Send email), which wins even when the person books with another address; a booking taken from the widget with no record attached is matched to a contact by the booker's address. When the service asks for it, a Follow up after <service> task is filed beside the meeting, due one business day after the slot. Nothing is filed on a site where the CRM is switched off, or for a workspace whose plan does not include the CRM.

Click to call

A contact's, a lead's and a company's page carries Call beside Send email: one tap dials the number the record holds, through whatever your device uses for a phone. The number itself is a link everywhere it is printed — on the record page and on the properties card — so it can be dialed from where you are reading it rather than copied out.

Only a number a dialer can take is a link. Write phone numbers with the country code, like +1 512 555 0107; spaces, dots, dashes and parentheses are fine and are ignored. A value that is not a number — "ask reception", an extension typed as x44 — is shown as plain text and Call says why it is unavailable, rather than offering a link that would ring nothing.

Log a call sits beside it and opens the dialog above with the kind already set to Call and the record already filled in, so logging what was said is one button and one sentence. It is there whether or not the record has a number: a call placed from your own mobile is still a call to log. The kind is a starting point, not a lock — change it in the dialog if the conversation turned out to be something else. Calling and logging a call are part of the CRM, included from Starter; on Free the record pages that carry them are locked with the rest of the CRM.

Sending an email

A contact's, a lead's and a deal's page each carry Send email: one message, from you, to the person the record is about. It is a letter, not a campaign — there is no audience, no designed layout and no unsubscribe footer — and it is logged on the timeline the moment it leaves, with its delivery state following. One-to-one email is part of the CRM, included from Starter; on Free the record pages that send it are locked with the rest of the CRM.

Field	What it is
To	The record's own address. It cannot be changed here: a deal writes to its contact, a lead to the address it was captured with.
From	The site's sending address — the same identity campaigns and transactional mail leave on — with your name in front of it.
Reply-to	Your own address, so a reply lands in your inbox rather than the site's mailbox.
Template	A saved letter to start from — fills in the subject and the message. Shown once the workspace has one; see Email templates & snippets.
Subject and Message	What you write. The message is plain text; a blank line starts a new paragraph. Insert drops a snippet or a merge field — {{contact.firstName}}, {{deal.amount}} — at the cursor, filled in from the record when the email is sent, and Save as template… keeps the draft for next time.

The send is refused, and the dialog says why, when:

• the site has no sending identity in effect — an admin sets one up under Emails › Sending, and the dialog links there;
• the address is on a suppression list because it bounced or reported a message as spam, or the person has asked this site not to email them;
• the organization has reached its one-to-one email allowance for the day — see the cap, which resets at midnight UTC;
• you have sent more than twenty emails in the last minute;
• the address's domain has no mail server, so the message could only bounce.

Before you send, the dialog warns when the address's domain has no mail server, or when the mail gateway in front of it has refused your site's sending address twice in the last 30 days and delivered nothing. The second is a warning only: a one-to-one email still goes, but it is likely to be refused too.

Every sent email counts toward the organization's email usage like any other message.

At the organization level the message still leaves from one site: the site that captured the person, or — for a record no site captured — the one you pick under Send from. The dialog links that site's Emails › Sending page when it cannot send.

Delivery states

A sent email's entry shows a chip beside Email that follows the message:

Chip	Meaning
Sent	The mail provider accepted it.
Delivered	The recipient's mail server accepted it.
Opened	The recipient opened it, as far as an open can be known.
Clicked	The recipient followed a link in it.
Bounced	The mailbox refused it. The address is suppressed and cannot be emailed again from this site.
Marked as spam	The recipient reported it. The address is suppressed.

The chip only ever moves forward — a late "delivered" never replaces an "opened" — and a bounce or a complaint stands over anything that came before it. Hover the chip for when the state was reached.

Captured email

A reply to a sent email reaches your mailbox, because that is where Reply-to points — and the console cannot see your mailbox. To put the reply on the record, hand it the message: forward it to the workspace's capture address, or put that address in BCC when you write to a contact from your own mail client. The address is printed under Reply-to in the Send email dialog and on the Email capture card under CRM → Settings, each with a copy button.

A message that arrives is filed as one email entry on the timeline:

• Whose record. The first address among From, To and Cc that is not a workspace member's and belongs to a contact or a lead in the CRM. A member's addresses are the one they sign in with and each one they have verified under Your sending addresses, so a message sent from a verified send-as alias is filed on the person it was written to. A lead's message files on the lead. The record's own site is the site the entry lands under, so at the organization level a capture works for every site at once.
• Which way. A message a correspondent wrote reads Received, with the sender beside the time; a message a member wrote and copied in reads Sent, without a delivery chip, because the platform did not carry it. Neither carries the Logged chip — nobody logged them — and neither can be edited, though whoever may delete an entry may delete these.
• What is kept. The subject and a bounded plain-text excerpt of the message, cut above the quoted history (On … wrote:), plus the message's own identifier so a second delivery of the same message is filed once. Attachments are not kept.
• What is dropped. A message matching nobody in the CRM is not filed; the organization's Setup → Activity feed notes Inbound email matched no record with the sender's domain, never the message. A message to a rotated address is dropped silently.

The console's own Send email already logs what it sends; there is no need to BCC the capture address from the dialog, and it does not.

Where an activity is visible

An activity is visible exactly where a contact captured on the same site would be: to that site alone, or to every site declared to be one sender with it, or to the whole organization when the organization has chosen an org-wide default. Logging an activity never widens what a scoped member can see, and a section of the CRM can never show an activity to somebody who could not open the record it belongs to.

The recent activity feed

The Contacts section shows the newest activity logged across the CRM in a Recent activity card of its own under the contacts list — the calls, emails, meetings and notes anyone on the team filed against any record — each linking to the record it is about. Its rows are collapsed like the timeline's and open the same way, Expand all is in its header, and it is paged ten at a time. The card appears once something has been logged. It is a glance at what the team has been doing; the record's own page is where the whole log lives.

Export… in the card's header takes every logged activity out as a file — its type, direction, when, the details and outcome, who logged it, and the contact (by email), company, deal and lead it is about — through the export dialog. Activities are logged on records as they happen, so they are exported and never imported.

Related

• CRM overview
• The contact record — the page a contact's timeline lives on
• Tasks & follow-ups — what is owed, as opposed to what happened
• Email templates & snippets — the letters Send email starts from, and the merge fields it fills in
• Automations for the CRM — the Log a CRM activity step, and how a Send an email step lands on the timeline
• Sending domains — the identity a one-to-one email leaves on
• REST API — activities