Summer '24 Broke Lead & Task Assignment Notifications in Account Engagement

I don't normally blog about known issues, but this one is likely to have widespread impact on many Account Engagement (Pardot) orgs and it's something that's easy to not realize is a problem because we as marketers are often not on the receiving end of lead assignment notifications. As it's also a platform/connector issue, it also lives in the murky world between org setup and Salesforce administration.

In a nutshell, here are the conditions: 1. You are using Account Engagement connector V2 with the B2BMA Connector User

2. You are creating new Leads when pushing records into Salesforce

3. You are assigning records one of these ways: A. With Active Assignment Rules

B. To a user directly

C. To a queue directly

D. Using Account Engagement Round Robin

In these conditions, "You have a new Lead" system generated assignment emails will not send.

**Update 6/28/2024: This issue has also been determined to affect new task assignment notifications sent by email where B2BMA is the sender ("create salesforce task"). The new task notification on the bell icon in lightning works, but no email will send.

The reason is the Salesforce Summer '24 Release has a new requirement that all system generated emails must be sent from a verified address. And the B2BMA connector, which is the triggering user for these kinds of email notifications doesn't have a real email address. So it can't be verified. To make matters worse, as many of you know, you can't change anything about the B2BMA connector user, including that email address. This is a known issue as of June 6. But based on my interactions with tech support and the number of reports thus far (38 as of the time of writing), it's not widely known. And the problem is crazy making because a lot of the other types of notifications still work. I recommend anyone that uses these kinds of notifications click "report" on the known issue page, as this will keep you informed of changes in status. Note also that the known issue understates the extent of the problem as I outlined in points 3:A,B, C and D earlier. Other possible consequences of this issue may include:

• Any Flow or Email Notification that uses the B2BMA sender or email address as an email sender will also no longer function. So check your automations and email notifications for who is the sender.

• All your regular users must have verified email addresses too. It's worth spot checking.

Now, I never like to suggest a problem without a solution, so here are some suggested workarounds (since the known issues page doesn't suggest any).

• Create a Salesforce flow to watch for lead creation where the created by ID is the b2bma user, and send an email alert to the new owner where the sender is a verified user.

• If you use queues, it's a bit trickier. You may need to assign the records to an intermediate user and pass it to the final queue so you can trigger the normal queue email from a user other than b2bma.

• Use an AE automation rule to watch for newly created/assigned leads that didn't come from a Salesforce downsync and send Pardot notifications (not very scalable, best for small teams)

• Add a notify users conditional completion action to key forms where assignment is one of the completion actions for notify for records that are not assigned.

• You could also change the connector user from b2bma to a different admin user. This is a rather drastic measure and has all kinds of implications-- I'd be very sure it wasn't going to cause a problem with other automations if this were your choice. There was also a suggestion online to use an API only user license as the connector, but you would have to make sure that the profile had the ability to create and write on leads and contacts.
  

Again, it's a great idea to report the known issue so you'll get notifications on when (and really hope it's when) this is fixed. This also lets Salesforce know the extent of the pain this issue is causing and may help prioritize a fix.