How does Email-to-Case work in Salesforce?
Email-to-Case creates a Case in Salesforce for every email received at a designated support address (e.g., support@yourcompany.com). It maps the sender's email to a Contact or Lead, captures the email subject as the Case subject, and stores the body and attachments on the Case's email related list. Subsequent email replies in the thread are automatically threaded onto the same Case using a unique Thread ID embedded in outbound email headers.
Salesforce offers two variants: standard Email-to-Case (a downloadable agent that runs behind your firewall and keeps email attachments larger than 25 MB accessible) and On-Demand Email-to-Case (fully cloud-based, supports attachments up to 25 MB, no agent installation required). On-Demand is the recommended approach for most organizations. Each routing address can be configured to set Case fields like Record Type, Priority, and Origin. Combined with Assignment Rules and Escalation Rules, Email-to-Case creates a fully automated support triage pipeline. Clientell AI can configure Email-to-Case routing, auto-categorization flows, and SLA-based escalation to streamline your support operations.