About Email Templates
Email Templates is the Setup area where you author and maintain the email content your portal sends. A template holds a subject line, a body, and the settings that control how it is rendered and where replies go. Bodies can contain merge tokens that resolve against a real record when the email is sent, so one template serves every recipient.
Templates are authored once and referenced by the features that send them: workflow email tasks, deal and case notifications, user activation and password emails, and other automations configured in their own Setup areas.
Where Email Templates Lives
Go to Setup > Create > Email Templates.
The Setup entry requires Create permission on the Email Template object. A user with only Read can open the module by URL and view templates, but the navigation entry will not appear for them.
Portal users cannot reach this module at all. Customer and Partner role types are denied View, Create, Edit and Delete on Email Template outright.
The Two Template Types
| Type | Best for | Body editing | Portal branding |
|---|
| Plain Text | Transactional messages such as order confirmations and status updates | Text editor with merge-token support | Not available |
| HTML | Newsletters, welcome emails, branded announcements | Rich-text editor with a source view | Full Branding or Basic Branding |
The type is chosen in the creation wizard and cannot be changed afterwards through any route, because it determines whether the body is treated as HTML or as plain text. Converting a template from one type to the other means creating a new template.
What You Can Do Here
- Author a subject and body, with merge tokens built from a picker rather than typed by hand.
- Draft with AI from a plain-language description of the email's purpose, audience and tone. Requires the AI Assistant license on your subscription.
- Localize into other languages. One template carries the source language plus a version per language; recipients receive the version matching their own language when one exists.
- Preview against a real record at desktop, tablet and mobile widths, under any portal's branding.
- Send a marked test to a small recipient list without triggering the automation that normally sends the template.
- Organize with tags, and search, sort and filter the list.
- Clone a template, including its translations and attached notes and files.
How Localization Works, Briefly
The template itself holds the source-language subject and body. Every other language is a translation of it, so a wording change has a single place to be made. When an email is sent, the recipient's language decides which version is used:
- An exact match on the recipient's language is used.
- Otherwise a regional variant falls back to its base language. Brazilian Portuguese falls back to Portuguese, and Mexican Spanish to Spanish.
- Otherwise the template's source language is used.
Custom labels, picklist values and dates inside the email also render in the recipient's language. See Localizing Email Templates.
System Templates
Templates shipped with the platform are flagged as system templates. Ordinary administrators cannot rename or delete them, and bulk delete and bulk tagging skip them and report how many were skipped. Only platform host users can rename, delete, tag or change the system flag.
Where to Go Next
Creating Email Templates >>