Outlook and Gmail Integrations Search Capabilities

The Outlook Integration and Gmail Integration each provide a dedicated search experience within the email client sidebar. This search is separate from Salesforce Global Search and is optimized for finding records that can have activities (emails, events, tasks) logged to them. The sections below describe how Automatic Search and Manual Search work in the integrations.

Automatic Search Behavior

When a user opens an email in the integration sidebar, Salesforce automatically searches for matching contacts or leads based on the email addresses in the To, From, and CC fields of the email. This automatic search runs without any user input and displays matching Salesforce records in the People section of the sidebar.
If an email address matches both a Salesforce contact or lead and a Salesforce user, the User record is selected as the default matching record when Enhanced Email is enabled. The user can select a different matching record from the People section if needed. Salesforce remembers the user's preferred matching record for future emails from the same email address within the same session.

Manual Search Behavior

When a user types a value in the integration's Search box, a dropdown first displays the Most Recently Used (MRU) records from the current Salesforce session. MRU records are the records the user has most recently viewed or worked on in Salesforce.
After the user clicks the Search button, results are returned from all Salesforce objects that have an Activity Timeline enabled, including custom objects where Activity Tracking has been turned on. Objects that do not support email logging are automatically filtered out of manual search results by design.