[SalesForce] Custom Send Email Button With A “Hidden” Email Template

Anyone have an idea on how to have an Email Template in Salesforce which most Users "cannot see" but which they can use to send to clients? This would be done via a simple Custom Button:

/email/author/emailauthor.jsp?retURL=/{!Opportunity.AccountId}&
rtype=003&p2_lkid={!Opportunity.AccountId}&
template_id=00X60000001euod

The problem becomes that in the windows produced by this, they can simply click "Select Template" and it defaults to the Folder the template came from. I can't simply remove the Select Template button since that's needed for "all other" emails.

UPDATE 1

I decided to try something illogical (to me) and it worked(?!). I created a Test email template folder which was set to "This folder is hidden from all users". I put a copy of the template there. I pointed my custom button at that copy of the template.

Not only did it allow the email template to be used by an average user, but when they click "Select Template", it does NOT show them that folder (as would be expected).

Does anyone know of any side effects I would be inheriting by doing this? This seems to be the exact solution I need – it just didn't make sense until I actually tried it (that you can use a template, if you know it's SFID, regardless of what folder it is in/permissions on that folder).

Best Answer

If you have power users that are determined enough they might still be able to navigate to the template by shortening the URL from
```
/email/author/emailauthor.jsp?retURL=/{!Opportunity.AccountId}&
rtype=003&p2_lkid={!Opportunity.AccountId}&
template_id=00X60000001euod
```
to
```
/00X60000001euod
```
(no idea if it'd give them "insufficient privileges").
The behaviour described in your "Update 1" sounds to me like some kind of security flaw that SF might decide to fix in future. I'm not sure I'd count on something like this in a production-ready functionality. Maybe simply raise a Case with support whether it's intended behaviour?
If it's acceptable to just fire the email as is (without user being able to preview & modify the body) maybe you can experiment with adding &save=1 to the URL. Still - a determined user might inspect the source of the button and learn the template id.
You could also consider a "do it yourself" solution with a bit of Apex? Both single and mass email objects have setTemplateid() method you could use. You can query the EmailTemplate object for IDs.

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[SalesForce] send email button from custom object

You can do this a number of ways..

The easiest is to use AMartin's hack here: https://success.salesforce.com/questionDetail?qid=a1X30000000KDqCEAW I use the term hack deliberately, because salesforce may not support this in the future.
Create a visualforce button that updates a field on the record and fires off a workflow email alert. You can choose the email template that email workflow alert fires off of.

[SalesForce] Email Button – Email Template

Salesforce.com has specifically prevented us developers from having an easy time using the standard interface to send emails without user intervention. We can create a link to go to the Send Email page, but the user still has to click on Send to send the email. Here's the link:

/_ui/core/email/author/EmailAuthor?p2_lkid={!Contact.Id}&rtype=003&retURL=%2F{!Contact.Id}&template_id=00X300000000000

Simply go to Setup | Customize | Contacts | Buttons, Links, and Actions, and create this as a new button or link of the "URL" type (you can use the same window). Change the Template ID to match the email template you'd like to auto-select.

If you want a one-click send feature, you'd need Visualforce.

Update

Here's a sample Visualforce page:

<apex:page standardController="Contact" extensions="sendEmail" action="{!sendEmail}">
    <apex:pageMessages />
</apex:page>

And associated controller:

public with sharing class sendEmail {

    ApexPages.StandardController controller;

    public sendEmail(ApexPages.StandardController controller) {
        this.controller = controller;
    }

    public PageReference sendEmail() {
        Messaging.SingleEmailMessage message = new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage();
        message.setTemplateId('00X30000000h4jF');
        message.setTargetObjectId(controller.getId());
        Messaging.sendEmail(new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage[] { message });
        return controller.view();
    }

}

Be sure to use "GET CSRF protection" on the page to prevent spoofing. Set the button or link behavior to "display in existing window without header or sidebar". From the user's perspective, it is nearly instantaneous.

Finally, you could also use the AJAX Toolkit's sforce.connection.sendEmail, but this will use API calls unnecessarily (but also avoid the white page flicker of the Visualforce solution).

Updated: I added the actual logic to send an email.

Updated: Here's a JavaScript-only version. Note that this will use API calls in addition to Mass Email limits, while Visualforce will only use Mass Email limits.

{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/28.0/connection.js")}
(function() {
sforce.connection.sessionId = "{!$Api.Session_ID}";
var message = new sforce.SingleEmailMessage();
message.replyTo = "{!$User.Email}";
message.targetObjectId = "{!Contact.Id}";
message.templateId = "00X30000000h4jF";
var result = sforce.connection.sendEmail([message]);
  if(result[0].success) {
     alert("I sent the email as you requested, master.");
  } else {
     alert("I had a booboo.");
  }
}());

Best Answer

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