User not receiving approval emails from Salesforce

In our today's blog we will discuss how and where to start troubleshooting when a user is not receiving approval emails. Approval emails are critical to any business especially when they are for Quote/Proposals.The approval process has a defined set of steps and approver's required for a record to be approved based on the criteria you define for a record to kick for approvals. 

Use Case:

123SFDC Org has an approval process defined for discounts. When a Quote is submitted with more than 40% discount, it goes through three tiers of approvals -> Approver1, followed by Approver2 and lastly Approver3. The last approver is not receiving any approval emails.  
Since the Quote has not been approved by the last approver,the Sales rep cannot submit the Quote to the Customer. 

In this scenario, I would first start by verifying the approval process. Should the approval email go to the third approval at all? Create some test quotes and kick the approval process. The approval related list will show who all are lined up in the approval process for this record. 

If your approval process is driven by the Role hierarchy then Approver 1 should not be higher in role than approver 2 and approver 2 should not be higher in role than approver 3. Approvers should have access to the related objects, apex class, controllers used to define the approval process. You can check their profile level access.   

Can the user see approvals in Salesforce?

Since the approver 1 and 2 are receiving emails, you know that the template is working fine. As an admin you can login as the user and look for approvals either on the home page or on the Quote/record itself. While you are troubleshooting the issue of why user is not receiving approval emails meanwhile you can always ask the user to approve it by logging in to the Salesforce because you don’t want to delay the Quote from not being sent out to the customer.

Send test and verify the email template

Go to your email template and send a test email.This is to check if the user receives the template in an email. 

Approver Settings on the User details page:

If you are not using role hierarchy for the approval process and you are using the Manager of the submitter or the Quote owner than you should verify if the user has a Manager defined on the user details also check the "Receive approval request emails" option. User will not receive any emails if the ‘Never ‘option is selected. 

Is your User receiving any emails from Salesforce at all?

Go to Setup -> Email Administration -> Test Deliverability 

Enter the user email address in the Test deliverability. The user should receive test emails from all the IP addresses of your Org. 

  

Sample email

Email Logs

Go to Setup --> Log--> Email Log Files

Email logs will help you to take a deeper dive into the email not received issue. You can track as far as last 30 days emails that are being sent out from Salesforce to the user.

Select the date range for which the user is not receiving any emails and submit the email log request. Don’t forget to specify your email address in the notification recipient box. You will receive a csv file with the log details. 

Don’t expect to receive the log file immediately. On an average it will take atleast 10 to 15 minutes to receive the log file depending on the number of emails that have been sent out to the user for the selected duration. Below screenshot gives brief explanation of the fields in the csv log file. 

Now if you do see emails being sent out to the user in the log file but the user is still not receiving emails than it could be an Outlook issue. You can try upgrading the Outlook to its latest version to see if this resolves the issue. 

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