Roastidio.us Tagged with admin

Email Isn't Dead, and Neither Is This Blog: Spam Resource at 25

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 21:06:34 +0000

When I published my very first post back in August 2001, I never envisioned that I'd still be sitting at a keyboard twenty-five years later talking about email deliverability.

A quarter of a century. Twenty of those on Google's Blogger platform. That is an internet eternity. Context: when Spam Resource launched, the CAN-SPAM Act didn't exist yet. Gmail wasn't even a thought in Google's mind. Mailbox providers, sending platforms, and blocking lists were operating in what felt like the wild west of digital communication.

I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to share my thoughts with the world for two and a half decades. Looking back, it's amazing to see how both the industry, the email ecosystem, and this blog, have evolved.

From Rants to Requirements: An Evolution

In the early days, Spam Resource was primarily a place for me to vent. I wanted to call out bad senders who didn't respect permission, and rant about the struggles of navigating early anti-spam blocklists and their maintainers. The folks behind those early lists were generally good people trying to solve a massive problem, but back then, the tools were blunt instruments and the humans developing and manning those tools were sometimes making mistakes that I felt were making "us" look bad, that is, harming all of our efforts to stop spam and keep the email inbox safe and usable.

Over time, the blog naturally transformed into something more constructive (I think, I hope): something of a guidebook for the sender side of the email ecosystem.

It became less about pointing fingers and more about showing email marketers how to be good participants in the inbox. What is permission, how to ensure you're getting permission, how to comply with changing standards, and how to send marketing messages (and maybe even make some money) without acting like a spammer.

At this point, this blog is a decades-long investigation into the mechanics of why mail lands in the spam folder, what to do when things go sideways, and how to troubleshoot the plumbing. We've learned to distinguish between the times a deliverability issue is genuinely a mailbox provider glitch (when it's not your fault) and when it's a sign that you need to fix your permission, authentication, or sending practices (when it is your fault).

Some Things Change, Some Things Not

Over 25 years, I've watched an endless parade of tech history, methodologies, and platforms roll by:

Mailbox providers have risen, merged, or vanished. Remembering the golden days of HoTMaiL, the last hurrahs of AOL dialup, and Compuserve as a valid email domain with actual email users. Nowadays? It's almost all about Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple.
Blocking lists have launched, evolved, or shut down completely. The binary blocklists of IP reputation, the most important first steps in the fight to stop spam from overwhelming our inboxes, are no longer where reputation really lives.
Platforms and email service providers (ESPs) have been acquired, pivoted, gone multi-channel, or retired. Everything became a marketing cloud. Some providers started in SMS and added on email. Others started in email and added on SMS. In the enterprise, everything was a CDP for a while, too. Is everything still a CDP? I've lost track.
Standards have continually stacked up. From early SPF and original DomainKeys (thanks, Yahoo!), to DKIM, DMARC, BIMI, and today's conversations around DKIM2, APRF, and AI-driven inbox filtering. So. Many. Acronyms.

People have come and gone (RIP, J.D. Falk and Chip House). The tools have changed (RIP, Pivotal Veracity). The rules have tightened (RIP, email append and blasting zillions to work around low engagement). But my dumb little blog, Spam Resource, is still here.

This is your fault: Thank You

None of this would mean anything without you all. The readers, subscribers, deliverability experts new and old, junior and senior. The email marketers, MTA developers, and industry peers who read these posts, send in questions, share feedback, and engage in the conversation every single week.

Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me, whether you've been reading since the early days of IP blocklists (not blacklists) or joined later on, as engagement has evolved to become a reputation metric and more recently, as we've navigated mandatory message authentication and DMARC enforcement, assumptions around political filtering bias, and AI inbox changes. And as the lines have blurred between email deliverability and email security, bringing us all closer together to understand that what we do has an impact on the usability of the email inbox and that we need to work together, collaboratively, to keep email a viable, safe, and usable communication channel.

The email ecosystem isn't going to stop evolving anytime soon. Sender requirements change; senders want to continue to reach the inbox. Threats evolve; bad guys looking for new ways to break through the barriers raised against them. Standards grow and change, as mailbox providers look to better protect, and keep their platforms compelling for, their users. I hope that you and I will both still be a part of that ecosystem, and that I'm able to stay right here, keeping you updated, as I learn more.

Here's to 25 years, and here's to email. It's not dead yet.

Setup with Agentforce: What Admins Can Actually Do Right Now - Salesforce Break

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:57:50 +0000

For a Salesforce admin, Setup is the cornerstone of the job. It’s where they access requests, field builds, make flow fixes, and check on org health. Setup with Agentforce puts a conversational layer on top of all of it. Instead of clicking through Object Manager or digging through the Setup Audit Trail, admins can just ask.

We’ve dug into the documentation across several Setup areas: user access management, data model management, flows, and org health and usage. We also talked with the product team directly. This helps us deliver the most accurate and complete overview of what’s supported today. Here’s what each area actually covers, and where the boundaries lie.

This is part one of a two-part series. Part two will cover the remaining Setup areas. We’ll be watching closely for updates coming out of Dreamforce, so keep an eye out for more.

Managing User Access With Setup with Agentforce

Access troubleshooting eats a lot of admin time. A user can’t see a record, or they can edit something they shouldn’t be able to touch, and figuring out why often means tracing permission sets, profiles, sharing rules, and role hierarchies by hand. Setup with Agentforce handles a generous slice of that work directly.

Admins can ask what access a specific user has to an object. They can ask why a user can edit a particular record, or why they can’t. The agent explains the reasoning behind record access, not just the outcome, which matters when you’re trying to fix the root cause instead of patching a symptom.

Sharing Rules and Configuration

The agent also reaches into sharing configuration. You can ask about organization-wide defaults for an object and update them through conversation. Updating OWDs needs the Manage Sharing permission. You can review criteria-based and owner-based sharing rules. See what access they grant to a specific user, role, or group. Creating sharing rules works too. Only criteria-based rules are supported, only on objects other than accounts, with a single criteria condition, and Manage Sharing is required.

Managing Groups, Queues, and Permission Sets

Group and queue management is covered too, with a few permission requirements attached. Admins can list public groups a user belongs to with no extra permission needed, though reviewing group membership needs Manage Users plus the “Enhanced Public Group Assignment” setting turned on. Creating a public group needs Delegated Administrator or Manage Users. Adding or removing users from permission sets, permission set groups, public groups, and queues needs Assign Permission Sets or Manage Users. Creating permission sets and permission set groups from scratch is gated behind Manage Profiles and Permission Sets.

Setup Audit Trail and Known Limits

The Setup Audit Trail folds in too, useful for questions like why a user lost the ability to manage other users. Real limits apply, though: guest user access questions aren’t supported, a response confirming edit access doesn’t always check for actual Edit permission, delete and transfer answers aren’t always accurate, sharing answers can turn unreliable on objects set to Controlled by Parent, and the agent can’t identify who made a specific Audit Trail change.

Building Data Models with Agentforce

Building out a data model is one of the more repetitive parts of admin work, and Setup with Agentforce is built to speed it up. Ask for a custom object, and the agent proposes one, reusing existing objects and fields where it can instead of creating duplicates.

The scope goes beyond a single object. You can ask for a custom object along with several fields in the same request, specifying data types like date, picklist, or checkbox. You can also ask for multiple related objects at once, including a parent-child pair or a junction object that connects two objects. A request like setting up a Course and Student object connected by an Enrollment junction object works in a single pass.

Supported Field Types and Object Reuse

Supported field types cover the essentials: checkbox, currency, date, date and time, time, email, long text area, lookup relationship, number, percent, phone, picklist, rich text area, text, text area, and URL. Picklists are capped at ten values per field, and multi-select or global picklists aren’t supported.

Object reuse has boundaries too. Every existing custom object in the org qualifies for reuse and field configuration, but standard objects are limited to a specific allowlist: Account, Asset, Campaign, Case, Contact, Contract, Lead, Opportunity, Order, Product2, and Quotes. Ask the agent to add a field to a standard object outside that list, and it won’t be able to help.

Scale Limits and Default Settings

There are ceilings on scale too. A single data model output tops out at fifteen objects and fifteen fields per object. Reuse of existing objects and fields stops working once an org passes 125,000 fields across custom objects and supported standard objects. And once something gets created, the agent can’t edit or delete it. Object Manager still owns that job. Discovery questions aren’t supported either. Asking the agent to list every field on the Contact object won’t work; that still requires Object Manager or a SOQL query.

New objects and fields come with sensible defaults baked in. A new custom object gets an auto-numbered record name field and has reports, activities, and Chatter groups enabled automatically. New fields get AI-generated help text and descriptions, along with type-specific defaults like a 255-character length for text fields or a two-decimal setup for currency fields.

Creating and Managing Flows

Flow automation is a narrower slice of Setup with Agentforce, but it covers a real need. Admins can ask the agent to build a flow for a specific purpose, like setting the status of new cases to Escalated before save, or copying an account’s phone number to related contacts whenever the account updates.

The agent can also summarize flows you already have. You can ask for a summary by flow label or by API name. This helps you understand what an existing automation does without opening Flow Builder and tracing every element by hand.

Retrieval is supported through filters. Admins can pull up all active flows created within a given window, or list every flow currently sitting in Draft status. This kind of quick inventory check is useful before a release. It helps confirm nothing unexpected got left in an incomplete state.

The scope here is intentionally limited. Any flow-creation request needs a clearly stated purpose, and the agent only builds autolaunched, record-triggered, and schedule-triggered flows. Screen flows and other flow types stay out of reach for now.

Monitoring Salesforce Org Health and Usage

This area turns the agent into a running diagnostic tool for the org itself. Admins can ask broad questions about overall health and usage, or narrow ones about a specific metric, and get an answer without navigating to a dozen different Setup pages.

Security gets direct coverage. You can ask for your org’s Security Health Check score or a general security status summary. Login errors are queryable too, including a breakdown by error type over a defined window like the past two days.

User access health rolls in here as well. Admins can ask which permissions have unusually low user counts, or whether any roles in the org sit unassigned. Storage utilization, Apex version currency, and custom component errors all get their own supported questions, so you can catch outdated dependencies or storage limits creeping up before they cause a problem.

A few areas go further than simple lookups. Lightning Experience performance can be compared week over week. License utilization questions cover both how many licenses are in use and which ones are closest to their limit. Org Trust Advisement data surfaces availability risks and recommendations for improving trust and availability.

For orgs running Experience Cloud sites, the agent can identify which objects, sensitive fields, or record counts sit exposed to guest users.

None of these org health questions carry extra permission requirements beyond the baseline for Setup with Agentforce. This lowers the barrier to visibility.

Get the Most Out of Setup with Agentforce

Start small if you’re rolling this out to a team. Try a data model or flow request first, since those produce clear, visible results fast. Once permissions are assigned correctly, day-to-day access questions and org health checks become second nature within a few conversations. The time savings compound the more you lean on the agent for routine lookups instead of manual navigation.

Setup with Agentforce isn’t a replacement for Object Manager, Flow Builder, or the Setup Audit Trail. It’s a layer that sits on top of familiar tools. It answers the questions you already ask throughout the day, just faster and without the manual navigation to get there. The permission boundaries and scope limits are real. Know them before you rely on the agent for something like guest user access review or bulk field edits. Within its supported scope, it condenses work that used to take several clicks into a single conversational request.

Explore related content:

Agentforce Coworker Applied: Enterprise Intelligence at Your Fingertips

Is Setup with Agentforce Ready for Prime Time?

Agentforce Pricing: A Tier-by-Tier Breakdown

Field Audits: Yearly Housecleaning for Your Salesforce Org - Salesforce Break

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:16:49 +0000

Every org starts clean. Someone builds the objects, adds the fields the business needs, and calls it done. Then a sales director wants one more field. Marketing wants three. Someone leaves the company, and nobody remembers what half those fields were for, only that deleting them feels risky. The org grows fields the way an old house grows junk drawers. One reasonable decision at a time, until you can’t find the scissors and everything is tangled in yarn.

Salesforce Field Usage: Why It’s Hard to Track

Salesforce doesn’t give you a built-in report showing what percentage of your records actually have a given field filled in. You’d think a data company would make that number easy to find. It doesn’t. Salesforce’s own help documentation confirms this and points admins to the AppExchange for a fix.

Image source: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/custom-fields-quick-look/create-a-custom-field?trailmix_creator_id=mscheer8&trailmix_slug=jj-objects-fields-relationships

There are free, native options on AppExchange, and they’ve become something close to a rite of passage for org cleanup. Point one at an object, and it shows you, field by field, how many records actually have data in that spot. Run it against Contact or Account, and you’ll likely find fields sitting at two percent, three percent, five percent full. Fields nobody uses. Fields cluttering page layouts and adding confusion to every report that touches them. Read to the end for some examples of AppExchange tools you can use.

Why Field Descriptions Matter for Agentforce

Fill rate isn’t the only thing worth checking on a field. There’s a second, easier-to-miss problem: does the field have a real description attached to it? That’s a different question entirely from whether the field holds data. A field can be fully populated on every record and still carry a blank or lazy Description in Setup.

According to Salesforce’s own guidance, the Description field, the one most admins fill in halfheartedly if at all, now does double duty. It tells a human what a field is for, same as it always did. It also tells Agentforce the same thing. The agent reads that description to decide whether a piece of data is worth pulling into its answer. A field with no description, or a lazy one that just repeats the field’s name, gives the agent nothing to work with. A clear one tells the agent exactly what it’s looking at.

How to Start Cleaning Up Salesforce Fields

You don’t need to overhaul the whole org in a weekend, and you shouldn’t try. This approach follows a rotational audit: one object a month. Credit goes to Lizz Hellinga, who presented this method at Texas Dreamin’ this year.

Pick one object: Start with whichever one gets touched the most, since that’s where the payoff is biggest. Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities are the usual suspects.
Run an AppExchange tool against it: Let the tool show you what’s populated and what’s gathering dust. Don’t guess. Guessing is how orgs end up full of assumptions.
Sort the results into three piles: Fields worth keeping as is, fields worth keeping but needing a real description, and fields worth removing once you’ve confirmed no automation or integration quietly depends on them.
Write descriptions a human would actually understand: Skip the jargon. Say what the field holds and why it exists, clearly enough that a new hire gets it on day one.
Move to the next object next month: Consistency beats heroics here. A rotational habit clears your whole schema in a year. One frantic weekend doesn’t.

A year from now, your schema will look nothing like it does today, and every field left standing will have earned its place.

Duplicate Records: Why They’re a Data Quality Risk

Fields aren’t the only clutter working against you. Duplicate records cause the same damage from a different angle, and they’re often worse, since a duplicate doesn’t just sit there like an empty field. Three versions of the same Account, each with slightly different data, leave an agent guessing which one to trust, the same way a rep gets confused working a lead that another rep already closed out under a different record.

For example, say “Acme Manufacturing” shows up three separate times in the org:

“Acme Manufacturing,” created by a sales rep from a cold call. Phone number only, no billing address, and the Account Owner is that rep.
“Acme Mfg Inc.,” created six months later by a different rep working an inbound lead. Has a billing address and a website, but no phone number, and the Account Owner is the second rep.
“Acme Manufacturing LLC,” imported through a data enrichment integration. Has the correct legal name and a D-U-N-S number, but the industry field is blank and it’s missing every open opportunity tied to the other two records.

None of these three records is wrong exactly. Each one just holds a different slice of the truth. A rep pulls up the first one and doesn’t see the open opportunity sitting on the third. An Agentforce action asked to summarize the relationship with Acme grounds itself against whichever record it happens to match, then gives someone a confidently incomplete answer, since it has no way of knowing the full picture is split across three places.

Image source: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/data_modeling/object_relationships?trailmix_creator_id=rsacristan&trailmix_slug=object-fields-y-realtions

Salesforce doesn’t block duplicates on its own out of the box, whatever your org may assume. Admins have to build that protection themselves, deciding what counts as a match and what Salesforce should do once it finds one.

A rotational audit is a natural place to run a deduplication pass alongside your field review, since you’re already elbow-deep in the object anyway. Check whether your duplicate rules are active for the object you’re auditing this month, then let Salesforce’s own duplicate jobs flag what’s already sitting there unmerged. Merge what you can with confidence, and flag anything ambiguous for a second look rather than guessing. An org with clean fields and duplicate records everywhere hasn’t solved its data problem. It’s only solved half of it.

Continuous Improvement, One Object at a Time

Set a real target, not a vague one. Field profiling with a genuine goal of zero percent unnecessary fill rate forces a decision on every field you’ve been avoiding. Either it earns its place through real usage, or it goes. Nothing in an org stays neutral forever. It’s either helping or it’s hurting.

Nobody throws a party for cleaning up an Object Manager, but six months into a rotational audit, your reports get more trustworthy, your page layouts get shorter, and your AI features start pulling the right data more often. None of that happens by accident. It happens because someone decided the junk drawer was finally worth sorting through. Start with one object this month. The rest of the schema will still be there next month, waiting its turn.

For official Salesforce documentation click HERE.

Here are a couple of AppExchange tools to start with: FieldSpy, FieldPro

Explore related content:

AI Data Masking and Sensitivity Mapping in Salesforce

Why Salesforce Profiles Are Putting Orgs at Risk

Object Relationships in Salesforce

Why Your Salesforce Report Exports Are Failing and How to Fix It - Salesforce Break

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 03:05:19 +0000

If you are a sales or support operations expert on Salesforce, you most likely use the export feature under reports. When you want to do your own analysis and follow up on MS Excel or Google Sheets, or send the list to an external provider this feature comes to the rescue. Older Orgs have many periodic workflows executed by a variety of users that involve such steps.

If you have been following Salesforce Break, you know that there have been many security incidents involving Salesforce recently. When Salesforce rolled out the recent tightened security measures, many of these report export workflows started breaking down. Salesforce now requires a step-up authentication whenever a user wants to export or print report data.

If you have been using an AppExchange (now AgentExchange) App for your data exports, the chances are that they broke down as well. Salesforce started moving away from some of the legacy methods of downloading data; for example, they don’t support csv exports of report data any more.

If your App or integration provider keeps up with these recent requirements and turns them into updates, then you are in lock. There are still supported and secure ways of exporting your data out of Salesforce.

The Problem with the Native Salesforce Data Connector

Several major issues make the native connector difficult to use in a professional environment:

1. Authentication Hurdles

Step-Up Authentication often triggers when a user attempts to export reports, leading to constant re-authentication requests. Salesforce says API access should not initiate step-up requests, but the migration to tightened security measures has been very painful and inconsistent. For automated or scheduled sheets, the sync is likely to fail because the background process cannot satisfy the interactive MFA challenge.

2. Analytics API Limitations

Salesforce has moved toward the Analytics API as the primary data extraction method for many integrated apps. While modern, this API brings strict limitations that were less prominent in older methods. Most notably, users are often hitting a 2,000-row limit on report exports through this method. In an era of “Big Data,” a 2,000-row cap is an immediate dealbreaker for most financial, sales, or operational audits. There is also an Org-wide limit that amounts to about 3 million records capacity per hour. This number, while it sounds pretty large, can be reached very easily in large orgs.

3. Changing Security Landscape

Beyond the hard caps, reliability has become a major concern. Recent data breach incidents forced Salesforce to make quick changes out of their usual release cycles. These changes broke workflows and decreased the reliability of solutions that have been working for years. If you are an admin of a Salesforce Org, it may be a good idea to trust a reliable partner to keep up with these changes and adopt to the new secured architecture as the requirements change.

The Solution: G-Connector by Xappex

Here is how I used the G-Connector by Xappex:

Use case: Bring in a report to Google sheets and prepare a workflow that can manage high volume of records.

Install the G-Connector Salesforce Sync Google Sheet Extension

Installing the G-Connector Google extension is fairly easy. You go to this link and install the extension by logging in with your Google Workspace username and password. You need to make sure that your Salesforce user is API-enabled. Once you authenticate, you go to the Salesforce Connected Apps OAuth Usage screen and install the Xappex connected app. This step should ensure that the connection can be established without issues in the future. Note that Xappex needs a few permissions, and these permissions will be listed for you to approve on both sides (Google and Salesforce).

Import Data (Or Export Data)

Import or export: it depends on where you’re standing, I guess. You’ll see these terms used interchangeably throughout the post.

Once you establish the org connection, go to Import Data / New from Report on the Xappex G-Connector extension. Choose the report you want to import from the pulldown showing all Salesforce reports. You can import all detail rows unformatted, or import the formatted report.

Future-Proof Your Workflow For Larger Volumes

The import went through without issues, but you are not sure what will happen when all users ask for report data in the future and/or the record count grows. To future proof your workflow, you can convert your report to SOQL and have Xappex pull the same data using the Salesforce API without involving reports. This feature, while still in beta, actually works very well. Click on the SOQL converter and generate the SOQL statement for your report.

Your workflow will not be subject to rate limits for the Analytics API now.

What does the Xappex G-Connector solution provide?

If you find yourself manually copying and pasting data to bypass the recently-added road blocks, it’s time to consider an enterprise-grade alternative. G-Connector by Xappex was designed to solve the exact pain points that the native connector can not cope with.

As a robust, professional-tier integration, G-Connector offers several advantages:

Solid Reliability: Xappex actively maintains G-Connector to stay ahead of Salesforce’s updates, including MFA and authentication changes, ensuring your data flows without interruption.
High Efficiency: While native tools often require you to refresh sheet by sheet, G-Connector allows you to refresh up to 100 sheets simultaneously.
Write-Back Capabilities: G-Connector’s “write-back” features allow you to edit your Salesforce records directly from Google Sheets and push those changes back to the CRM, effectively using your spreadsheet as a bulk editor.
Smart Refresh: This feature keeps your sheet updated by refreshing existing rows at their current positions, ensuring that any custom columns or formulas you’ve added next to your Salesforce data remain perfectly aligned.

Together, these features give you the reliability your team needs without the manual copy-paste routine.

Workarounds for Report Exports

While moving to a more robust tool is the best long-term strategy, there are immediate workarounds you can implement to keep your reporting alive during this transition:

Manage Your Data Volume: To avoid the 3 million record cap per organization per hour (a limit easily reached in large orgs), consider reducing the number of rows per export or staggering your scheduled refreshes across different times of the day.
The Shift to SOQL: When report exports fail due to the 2,000-row limit or API restrictions, the most effective workaround is often to use Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL). SOQL is significantly more powerful and flexible than standard reports. While the native Data Connector limits SOQL queries to roughly 10,000 rows, G-Connector’s paid plans allow for much larger exports, helping you bypass the standard report caps entirely. G-Connector includes a nice SOQL statement builder and editor.

The Report to SOQL Converter: One of the biggest barriers to using SOQL is the learning curve; not every admin wants to write code. Xappex provides a unique, free tool (beta) called the “Report to SOQL converter.” This feature allows you to take an existing Salesforce report and automatically transform it into a SOQL query. This simplifies the transition, giving you the power of a query with the ease of a report-building interface.

Why G-Connector Is the Smarter Salesforce Export Solution

In a modern Salesforce environment, your productivity is only as good as your data access. Relying on a native tool that struggles with MFA enforcement and imposes restrictive row limits is no longer a viable strategy for busy admins.

G-Connector by Xappex offers a seamless, reliable, and enterprise-ready alternative that turns Google Sheets into a functional extension of your CRM. Whether you need to bypass the 2,000-row limit, automate complex snapshots, or easily push data back to Salesforce, G-Connector is the tool that keeps you moving forward.

Try G-Connector for free today and experience reliability, efficiency and the flexibility it brings to your workflows.

This post is sponsored by Xappex.

AI Data Masking and Sensitivity Mapping in Salesforce - Salesforce Break

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:18:13 +0000

Every new Agentforce feature widens your org’s permission surface. Prompt templates, Agentforce actions, and Einstein Copilot setups all touch sensitive data in ways your existing security reviews may not cover. If your quarterly security health check still treats AI features as an afterthought, it’s time to build them into the core cadence.

AI data masking and sensitivity mapping deserves a spot in your governance framework alongside the checks you already run. This covers two related tasks. First, auditing how the Einstein Trust Layer protects data moving to and from large language models. Second, verifying that standard users can’t reach admin-level AI configuration they were never meant to touch.

This piece builds on the org governance framework Lizz Hellinga presented at Texas Dreamin’, expanded here with a closer look at AI data masking and sensitivity mapping.

What the Einstein Trust Layer Actually Does

The Einstein Trust Layer is the built-in gateway that every Salesforce-originated generative AI call passes through, whether that’s Prompt Builder, an Agentforce action, or Einstein for Service reply recommendations. Every prompt and every model response routes through this layer first, which is the entire reason admins can point Agentforce at real production data without treating it as an open security hole.

Image source: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=ai.generative_ai_trust_arch.htm&type=5

Three architectural facts matter for your audit:

Zero Data Retention

Salesforce runs under contracts with external model providers, including OpenAI and Azure OpenAI, that require any data sent for processing to be wiped once a response is generated. Nothing lingers on the provider’s side after the exchange completes. This is a contractual commitment, not a configuration toggle, so your audit should confirm which model providers your org actually uses and verify those agreements apply.

Data Masking With a Catch

Image source: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=ai.generative_ai_trust_arch.htm&type=5

Before a prompt reaches an external model, the Trust Layer scans it for sensitive elements and swaps them out for placeholder text. Once the model responds, it maps those placeholders back to the original values before the reply reaches the user. This masking step doesn’t currently apply to agent interactions. It’s active for embedded features like Einstein Service Replies and Einstein Work Summaries, which you can configure directly in Trust Layer setup, but agent traffic runs outside that protection today.

Grounding Respects Existing Permissions

When a prompt pulls in Salesforce data to ground its response, it can only see what the person running that prompt is already allowed to see. Nobody gets a backdoor through AI that bypasses their normal profile or permission set. This single fact is why your permission set hygiene reviews directly determines what your AI features can see. A bloated profile creates risk in every AI-generated response that user triggers.

Permission Set Exposure Control: Who Can Touch What

Prompt templates run on a two-tier permission model, and mixing these up is one of the most common gaps you may see in org audits.

One permission set lets a person open and use existing prompt templates day to day. A separate one is required before anyone can build a new template or change an existing one. A standard sales rep might reasonably need User access to run an approved template. That same rep should almost never hold Manager access, since that would let them create or edit templates that touch production data and control what gets sent to an LLM.

Run this check as part of your quarterly security review:

Pull every user currently assigned Prompt Template Manager: Confirm each one is an actual admin or a designated AI process owner, not a standard user who inherited it through a cloned permission set.
Cross-reference Prompt Template User Assignments: Run this against your active Agentforce and Prompt Builder rollout. Deactivate access for anyone outside the current pilot or use case.
Check for any custom permission sets built before your AI rollout: It’s possible some may have accidentally bundled prompt template access alongside unrelated permissions.

Third-party tools built for Salesforce metadata auditing can help here. They let you compare permission set assignments across your org at once instead of clicking through Setup user by user. This becomes especially useful once you’re managing more than a handful of AI-related permission sets across sandboxes and production.

Security Health Check Cadence for AI Governance

Include this work into your existing security health check rather than treating it as a separate initiative. Here is a practical sequence:

Image source: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=xcloud.security_health_check.htm&type=5

Quarterly: Run the Salesforce Security Health Check. Add the prompt template permission set audit above. Review sharing rules and guest user access alongside it, since AI grounding inherits from the same access model.

Monthly: Spot-check any newly created permission sets or permission set groups for accidental AI access bundling. This catches drift early instead of finding it during the next full quarterly pass.
Annually: Revisit which LLM providers your org actually connects to and confirm the zero data retention terms still apply to each one you’re using.

None of this requires a new committee or a separate audit calendar. It just means widening the checklist you already run. The quarterly, monthly, and annual cadence above slots directly into existing security workflows, so nothing new gets added to anyone’s plate beyond a few extra line items.

Building Toward AI-Ready Data Hygiene

There’s a second layer to sensitivity mapping that extends beyond permissions: the data itself. Clean, well-described custom fields help grounding retrieve the right information and help any AI feature understand what it’s looking at. A field with a vague API name and no description is a governance problem whether or not AI ever touches it, but it becomes a bigger one once an LLM is expected to reason over it accurately.

If you’re running a rotational field and object audit as part of your broader governance framework, use it to flag fields feeding into prompt templates or Agentforce actions first. Prioritize those over the general backlog. Bad grounding data can produce a wrong answer a rep sends straight to a customer.

Run your Einstein Trust Layer Audit Now

AI features move fast, but the governance behind them doesn’t have to lag. Most of the controls covered here already exist inside Salesforce. They just need to be checked on purpose instead of assumed. Bring the Einstein Trust Layer and prompt template permissions into your regular security cadence. Treat AI access like any other permission risk. Your org will be in better shape than the one that finds out the hard way.

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Agentforce Coworker Applied: Enterprise Intelligence at Your Fingertips

Why Salesforce Profiles Are Putting Orgs at Risk

The Real Lessons Behind a Year of Agentforce Rollouts

Why Salesforce Profiles Are Putting Orgs at Risk

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:24:00 +0000

Salesforce admins have relied on Profiles for decades. They feel familiar. They feel safe. According to Andrew Day, Fractional CISO and founder of 22 Nexus, that familiarity is exactly the problem. At Texas Dreamin’ 2026, Day delivered a session that walked attendees through why Profiles have become the biggest obstacle to real security in Salesforce …

The post Why Salesforce Profiles Are Putting Orgs at Risk appeared first on Salesforce Break.

Object Relationships in Salesforce - Salesforce Break

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:24:00 +0000

When you’re just starting out learning the basic foundational concepts in Salesforce, it helps to break them down like this: one object, one purpose, and then a set of rules for how objects connect to each other. Object relationships are exactly that connective tissue. They let you link records together so users can see related data without hunting for it across the org.

Think about a school tracking student enrollment. A staff member opens a student’s record and needs to see every course that student is enrolled in, right there on the page. That visibility doesn’t happen automatically. Someone has to define a relationship between the Student object and a custom Course object first. Once that relationship exists, the data shows up together, and the whole team works faster.

We’re going to walk through the main relationship types, what each one is good for, and the tradeoffs for each choice.

Master-Detail Relationships

A master-detail relationship ties two objects together so tightly that the master record controls the detail record’s behavior. Delete the master, and Salesforce deletes every related detail record with it. Undelete the master, and those detail records come back too.

This tight coupling shows up in a few other ways. Detail records don’t have their own Owner field. Instead, they inherit ownership from the master record. That also means custom objects sitting on the detail side can’t use sharing rules, manual sharing, or queues, since all of those depend on an Owner field being present.

Security works the same way. Detail and subdetail records inherit their permissions from the master, so you can’t set access on the detail record independently. The relationship field itself is required on the detail record’s page layout, and by default, records can’t be reparented to a different master. An admin can turn on reparenting for custom objects if the business need calls for it.

There’s a practical limit worth remembering here too: Salesforce recommends keeping master-detail relationships under 10,000 child records, and each custom object can have a maximum of two master-detail relationships along with 40 total relationships.

One more thing to flag: once you save a master-detail relationship, you can’t change what it’s related to. Get the object selection right before you commit. As a general rule, lookup relationships are the safer starting point. Default to lookup relationships unless you have a specific reason to need the tighter coupling master-detail provides.

Lookup Relationships

Lookup relationships connect two objects in a much looser way. They work similarly to master-detail relationships, but they skip sharing inheritance and roll-up summary fields entirely. You can link two different objects, or you can link an object to itself, as long as that object isn’t the user object (which has its own special hierarchical relationship type, covered below).

Roll-Up Summary Fields and the Standard Object Exception

One nuance worth flagging, especially for custom objects: roll-up summary fields require a master-detail relationship. You can’t add a roll-up summary field on top of a lookup relationship, only master-detail supports it.

Standard object relationships bend this rule, though. Relationships between standard objects like Contact, Lead, Account, Case, and Opportunity are sometimes called special relationships. They behave like a hybrid of master-detail and lookup, but they aren’t strictly either one.

The Opportunity-to-Account relationship is a good example. Account is optional on Opportunity, which is normally a lookup trait. Yet you can still create a roll-up summary field from Opportunity up to Account, something that isn’t available for a true lookup relationship between two custom objects.

Because the coupling is looser, lookup relationships give you more configuration choices. You decide whether the field is required. If it’s optional, you choose what happens when someone deletes the linked record: clear the field automatically, block the deletion outright, or delete the child record along with it.

That last option, deleting the child record too, deserves real caution. Salesforce calls this a cascade-delete, and it bypasses normal security and sharing settings. A user could end up deleting records they wouldn’t otherwise have access to, simply because the parent record they do have access to got deleted. For this reason, cascade-delete is turned off by default, and you need to request it from Salesforce before it becomes available as an option.

Lookup relationships also come with volume considerations. If the combined record count across both linked objects exceeds 100,000, you can’t delete an object or record involved in that relationship until you bring the count down.

Many-to-Many Relationships and Junction Objects

Sometimes one master-detail relationship isn’t enough to model how your data actually works. Picture that Student and Course example again, but now imagine a single student enrolls in multiple courses, and a single course has multiple students enrolled. That’s a many-to-many relationship, and Salesforce handles it through a junction object.

A junction object is simply a custom object holding two separate master-detail relationships, one to each of the objects you’re connecting. Build the junction object first, then create both master-detail fields on it, one at a time.

Order matters here more than you might expect. The first master-detail relationship you create becomes the primary relationship, and it determines the look, icon color, and inherited ownership of the junction records. The second one becomes secondary, and it only takes over as primary if you later remove the first relationship.

Renaming Related Lists Doesn’t Remove the Extra Click

Once both relationships exist, you’ll want to rename the related list labels on each master object’s page layout. This step is easy to misunderstand, so it’s worth being precise about what it actually changes.

Renaming the label doesn’t change what’s inside the related list. The related list still shows junction object records, the actual Course Enrollment records, not Course or Student records directly. Renaming the label just changes what that list is called on the page. So instead of a generic label like “Course Enrollments,” you might rename it to something that hints at the other side of the relationship, but clicking into any row still opens a Course Enrollment record first. From there, you’d click again to reach the actual Course or Student.

That two-step path, from Student to Course Enrollment to Course, is normal for junction objects. It’s built into how master-detail relationships work, and renaming labels doesn’t remove that extra click.

Some standard Salesforce objects hide this navigation on purpose, at least visually. Opportunity Products is a good example. When you add a product to an opportunity, it looks like you’re selecting products directly. In the background, Salesforce is still creating a junction object record connecting the two.

Junction objects come with their own deletion behavior worth knowing. If either master record is deleted, the junction record moves to the Recycle Bin. If both master records get deleted, the junction record is gone permanently and can’t be restored.

Hierarchical, External, and Indirect Lookups

A few more specialized relationship types round out the picture. Hierarchical relationships exist only for the user object, and they let you build something like a manager chain, where one user links to another without any circular references back to itself.

External lookup and indirect lookup relationships come into play when Salesforce Connect is involved. An external lookup connects a child object to a parent that lives in an external data source. An indirect lookup flips that, connecting a child external object to a parent that lives inside your Salesforce org, matched through a unique external ID field. These are less common in day-to-day admin work, but they matter a lot once external data sources enter the conversation.

Converting Between Relationship Types

Relationships aren’t always permanent decisions. You can convert a master-detail relationship to a lookup, as long as no roll-up summary fields exist on the master object. You can also go the other direction and convert a lookup to a master-detail relationship, but only if every record’s lookup field already contains a value.

There’s one blocker worth knowing before you try that second conversion. A lookup relationship can’t be converted to master-detail if the child object’s organization-wide default is already set to Controlled by Parent. You’ll need to change that setting first before the conversion will go through.

Converting a lookup to master-detail changes the organization-wide default to Controlled by Parent, and it updates the sharing model to public read/write. Converting the other way, from master-detail to lookup, changes the organization-wide default on the detail object to public read/write as well.

Reports depend on these relationship types too, so a conversion can break custom reports that relied on the old structure. Test your reports right after any conversion, before anyone downstream notices something looks off.

Choosing the Right Salesforce Relationship Type

Object relationships aren’t just a technical detail buried in Setup. They shape how users see data and control record deletion and restoration. They determine ownership and which reports are possible. Getting the relationship type right from the start saves rework later. Some decisions, like the Related To field on a master-detail relationship, can’t change once saved.

Start with the business question first: does one record truly control another, or are they simply connected? That question alone points you toward master-detail or lookup. From there, the rest of the configuration choices get a lot easier to reason through.

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Agentforce Coworker Applied: Enterprise Intelligence at Your Fingertips

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:26:15 +0000

For years, enterprise productivity has suffered from a subtle tax: context switching.

Sales executives, account managers, and customer success teams spend a fraction of their week actually talking to customers. The rest of their time is spent hunting through tab after tab, jumping from CRM records to email threads and opening Jira tickets. They also pull reports from Tableau, cross-reference customer support tickets, and ping colleagues in Slack to verify account histories.

The promise of modern enterprise AI isn't just about generating text or writing code; it is about bringing all your organization's scattered data directly to your fingertips through Large Language Model (LLM) interfaces. Instead of navigating complex database structures, you simply converse with your data in natural language.

The post Agentforce Coworker Applied: Enterprise Intelligence at Your Fingertips appeared first on Salesforce Break.

Agentforce Pricing: A Tier-by-Tier Breakdown - Salesforce Break

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:26:15 +0000

Agentforce is Salesforce’s platform for building and deploying AI agents across the Customer 360 ecosystem. It lets teams create both customer-facing agents (handling support conversations, answering product questions, or resolving cases) and user-facing agents (automating internal tasks, summarizing records, or assisting reps in the flow of work). Agents built on the platform can take autonomous actions, like updating a record or triggering a flow, rather than just generating text responses. It’s built to work natively within Salesforce data and processes, so agents draw on existing CRM context instead of operating as a separate bolted-on tool.

Salesforce has restructured Agentforce pricing around usage and business value instead of flat seat licenses. This guide breaks down each pricing tier, what it costs, and where the credits actually go. We’ll cover the free Foundations tier, the two usage-based options (Flex Credits and Conversations), and the flat-rate licensing paths built for employee-facing agents.

Tier 1: Salesforce Foundations (Free)

Salesforce Foundations gives every org a free entry point into Agentforce. We see this as the sandbox tier: it lets teams build and test before committing budget.

Foundations includes:

Agentforce Builder
Prompt Builder
Agent Script
Agentforce Coworker
Agentforce Vibes

There’s no cost to start here. It’s the right tier for proof-of-concept work or for admins who want hands-on time with Agentforce before scaling up.

Tier 2: Flex Credits Explained ($500 per 100k credits)

Flex Credits are the pay-as-you-scale option for customer-facing and employee-facing agents. Salesforce prices this tier at $500 USD per 100,000 credits. Not every interaction with an agent draws credits. Only metered actions do. If an exchange doesn’t require a specific action, like updating a record or triggering a flow, there’s no charge for it.

This tier covers:

Customer-facing agents
Employee-facing agents
Agentforce Voice
Digital Wallet tracking
Flexible buying models
Agentforce Vibes

Salesforce introduced Flex Credits in 2025, shifting billing from a flat per-conversation rate to a per-action model. That year, Agentforce add-ons and Agentforce 1 Editions became generally available for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Field Service, and Industries Clouds, replacing the older Einstein add-ons and Einstein 1 Editions entirely. In other words, the tier structure this post walks through has only existed for about a year, and Salesforce has continued adjusting it since, most recently with a pay-per-resolution model for Help Agent in June 2026.

How Flex Credits Get Consumed

Each Agentforce Action draws credits from your pool. An action is any discrete task an agent performs: updating a record, summarizing a case, answering a product question, or running a custom flow.

Here’s the rate card for Agentforce usage:

Agentforce Actions

Bring Your Own LLM: Connect External AI Models to Agentforce

BYOLLM lets customers connect an externally hosted large language model to Agentforce instead of relying only on Salesforce-managed models, extending the same choice Salesforce already offers for predictive AI. Setup happens in AI Models (formerly Einstein Studio), where admins add a foundation model from a supported provider, OpenAI, Microsoft Azure, Google Vertex AI, or Amazon Bedrock, and connect it with their own credentials. For anything outside those providers, including custom or in-house models, the LLM Open Connector allows a connection to any model that follows Salesforce’s Open Connector spec.

The external provider handles inference, but requests still route through the Models API and Einstein Trust Layer, so governance and data controls stay intact. Once connected, a BYOLLM model plugs into Prompt Builder and custom Agentforce actions like any Salesforce-managed model. On the credit side, Starter Prompts run 2 credits regardless of environment, so production and sandbox cost the same. That rate comes from the Flex Credits rate card you provided; I couldn’t independently confirm it elsewhere online.

Salesforce-Enabled Foundational LLMs

The table below breaks down the cost of using Salesforce’s own managed models, as opposed to models you connect yourself through BYOLLM. Each tier corresponds to a different level of model capability: Basic Prompts cost 2 credits, Standard Prompts cost 4 credits, and Advanced Prompts cost 16 credits, with the price rising as the underlying model gets more capable. These rates apply to Agentforce 1 Edition customers, Agentforce for Sales, Service, and Industries customers, and any other products that no longer bill through Einstein Requests. Orgs still on an Einstein Requests billing model wouldn’t use this multiplier structure.

For a specific project, it’s worth checking the Agentforce and Generative AI Usage and Billing help article for the latest guidance on what counts as “Basic” versus “Advanced.”

Service and Speech Foundations

Beyond core Agentforce actions, two more usage types draw from the same Flex Credit pool. Help Agent Resolutions, tied to Salesforce’s Service offerings, run a flat 400 credits per resolution. Speech Foundations covers voice and language processing, and it’s priced differently depending on what the task involves. Converting speech to text costs by the hour of audio processed, while text-to-speech and translation scale by the volume of characters involved.

Data 360 Pricing: How Volume-Based Credit Tiers Work

Data 360, formerly Data Cloud, is Salesforce’s unified data platform that powers Agentforce with customer context, pulling data from CRM records, warehouses, and unstructured sources into a single usable layer. Because it processes such large data volumes, Salesforce prices it differently than standard Agentforce Actions: usage scales with volume instead of a flat per-action rate.

Rates drop as monthly usage climbs through four tiers, from a base tier covering up to 300,000 credits through Tier 4, which kicks in after 12.5 million credits. Tiers reset on the first of each month and apply independently per usage type. Sandbox environments skip the tiered discount entirely and run at one fixed rate regardless of volume. A few examples from the production base tier:

Tier thresholds reset on the first day of each calendar month. Customer 360 Platform usage types (Salesforce record operations and process invocation via Flows and Apex) are listed as TBA on the current rate card.

One note worth flagging for admins: sandbox multipliers apply to any pre-production environment, including scratch orgs, not just full sandboxes.

Tier 3: Conversations ($2 per conversation)

Conversations offer a simpler, per-conversation pricing model at $2 USD each. This tier is narrower in scope than Flex Credits:

Customer-facing agents only
Digital Wallet tracking included
Pre-Purchase buying model only

The Conversations rate card is simple by comparison. Agentforce usage across ASA Messaging, Sales Coach, and SDR all carry a multiplier of 1 conversation credit. Salesforce notes that certain Agentforce features can also draw down Einstein Requests and Data Services Credits alongside conversations, so teams should watch more than one meter.

Employee-Facing Tiers: Add-Ons and Editions

For company-wide employee agent access, Salesforce offers licensing paths outside the credit-based model entirely.

Agentforce add-ons: $125 per user per month for Sales, Service, and Field Service. This includes unmetered Agentforce usage for employees plus Salesforce’s broader AI suite in the flow of work.

Agentforce Industries add-ons: $150 per user per month for Industries Clouds, layering industry-specific AI on top of everything in the standard add-ons.

Agentforce 1 Editions: start at $550 per user per month. This bundles the Agentforce add-on with 2.5M Flex Credits per org per year, aimed at orgs standardizing on Agentforce across Sales, Service, Field Service, and Industries.

Agentforce User License: $5 per user per month but requires a Flex Credits balance to function. It gives every employee limited CRM object access and meters usage against your Flex Credit pool rather than including it flat.

Agentforce Buying Models

Three purchase structures apply across these tiers:

Pre-Purchase: Buy a set usage amount for the full contract term and pay upfront. This option saves the most, with usage drawing down from a prepaid balance.
Pre-Commit: A committed usage arrangement.
PayGo: Pay for usage as it happens.

All three models connect to Digital Wallet, which tracks Agentforce consumption in real time.

Conclusion

Agentforce pricing scales in three distinct directions: free experimentation through Foundations, metered growth through Flex Credits or Conversations, and flat-rate employee licensing through add-ons and Editions. The right tier depends on whether your agents are customer-facing or employee-facing, and whether your usage patterns are predictable enough to commit to a license versus pay-as-you-go credits.

Pricing details are subject to change. Confirm current rates with a Salesforce account executive before budgeting a rollout. Official Salesforce page can be found here.

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Headless 360: Build an Agentforce Agent Using Natural Language

n8n and Salesforce: Simplifying Complex Integrations - Salesforce Break

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:26:15 +0000

Let’s face it; integration in Salesforce is not as easy as it is supposed to be. It requires coding in Apex in most cases, so non-developers are already out of the game. There is no native logging solution and a developer has to build one from the ground up (or use Nebula Logger). It is difficult to call AI interfaces such as Claude API and OpenAI Responses API, and even more so to put Salesforce on the recipient side and another widely known service, such as Gmail or WhatsApp, on the triggering side.

Luckily for us, Salesforce is trying to remedy this and break Agentforce out of self-containment by releasing Headless 360 and letting external channels (apps, agents, bots) interact with Salesforce without relying on standard UI flows. However, this doesn’t solve all of our problems regarding integrations and automations: we still need an integration layer for event ingestion on Salesforce’s side. We may want to trigger Salesforce from our business email inbox. Additionally, we may want to create a Lead using WhatsApp or Telegram, send a message on those platforms without relying on Apex, or simply use basic triggers and webhooks instead of agentic workflows.

What is n8n and Why Use It?

Here’s where n8n (pronounced “n-eight-n” or sometimes “nathan”) comes in. With its name standing for “nodemation”, n8n provides a visual interface similar to Flows for extensive business process automation including AI capabilities, fully deserving its nickname of “the Swiss army knife of workflow automation.” It enables businesses to build powerful automations and AI-driven workflows, such as integrating large language models, handling data pipelines, and orchestrating cross-system processes while retaining full control through self-hosting or cloud deployment. Any service you may need for your personal or commercial uses, including Salesforce, Gmail, WhatsApp, Instagram and Claude API, is available in n8n. It also allows you to natively write code in Python or JavaScript when you need it, showcasing this capability as, “Code when you need it, UI when you don’t.”

n8n offers a free trial for 14 days, with a fair pricing plan depending on your needs. You can also choose to self-host n8n to overcome its governor limits including the number of workflows and monthly workflow executions if your automation needs are high.

For the purposes of this article, we assume that we are running a travel agency. Leads are coming to us through emails, and our requirement is to automate the process of Lead creation instead of manually entering the Lead values every time. An email that necessitates a Lead creation will have content that expresses interest in a tour package: “I would like to inquire about your Grand Canyon tour package” or “I would like to book your Japan tour.”

On the other hand, we may also receive emails that don’t fall into this category; they may contain complaints, reviews or they may simply be promotional emails. Therefore, we have to introduce a layer of sentiment analysis, which will be achieved through AI, to our workflow. When the sentiment is positive (i.e. the email came from a prospective client), our workflow should create a Lead. When it is negative, it should do nothing.

Creating the Workflow

Click the “Create workflow” button at the upper right corner.

We are met with two options: building our workflow manually or with AI. You can try out the AI creation tool, but for this tutorial we will be adding our workflow trigger manually. Click “Add first step,” then search for Gmail on the toolbar that appears on the right. It should be under the “On app event” section. There is only one trigger: On message received. Click it and log into your Gmail account under the Credential field. These credentials will be saved into your personal credential archive which can be found under the “Credentials” menu in the page shown above. Leave everything as is and go back to your workflow. It should look like this:

Analyze Email Content with AI

The content of the email should then be analyzed by an LLM to check whether it belongs to a prospective customer or not. Click the small plus sign and add the LLM of your choice (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini etc.) Log in to the API that you chose when you are prompted by n8n, make sure that the Resource value is selected as “Text” and the Operation is “Message a model”. Choose a model and enter a prompt that will not only do sentiment analysis for you, but also summarize the email content and extract the first and last name of the email sender from the content. Below is a sample prompt that I am running on Claude Haiku 4.5 with the Anthropic Message a model node:

You are a travel agent who will receive booking requests and inquiries about tour packages through email. Below is the content of the most recent email received by a prospective customer (below the separator given as '-----'). Analyze the content and return a JSON containing four variables:
- isProspect: A Boolean value that contains whether the email sender is looking to book a tour package (e.g. "I want to book..." or "I would like to buy..."), or is asking questions about a tour package (e.g. "I would like to inquire...", "I want to ask about this package..."). If the sender is doing so, the value should be true. If the sender is not doing so (they may be issuing a complaint, it could be a promotion mail etc.), the value should be false.
- emailSummary: A String value that contains the summary of the email in one or two sentences.
Output only the JSON value and nothing else.
- firstName: A String value that contains the first name of the email sender if it can be found in the email.
- lastName: A String value that contains the last name of the email sender if it can be found in the email.
{{ $json.snippet }}

Let us pause here for a while and examine our prompt. Essentially, we are configuring our AI so that it:

assumes its role as a travel agent/assistant
knows where the prompt ends and the email content begins
analyzes the sentiment given in the email, in the sense that an email such as “I would like to book your Japan tour” would belong to a prospective client, while “Congratulations! You have earned a coupon” would not
summarizes the email content and extracts the first and last name of the email sender
returns the output as a JSON which makes it easier for us to parse

The {{ $json.snippet }} at the bottom of the prompt refers to the body of the email, which can be put into the free text area by simply dragging and dropping from the left hand side of the screen. The reference will be resolved when the workflow runs, wrapping up the email content inside the prompt and handing it over to the LLM.

The output of the LLM will be a String that looks like:

{
  "isProspect": true,
  "emailSummary": "The sender wants to book the Grand Canyon tour package.",
  "firstName": "John",
  "lastName": "Appleseed"
}

Parse the AI Response with a Code Node

This is obviously not a JSON, but a format that allows the AI to return a JSON value in code view. To be able to parse this, we need to get rid of the artifacts that we don’t want (such as “`).

Add a Code node (found under the “Core” section) and choose Code in JavaScript. There is also an option to code in Python but vanilla Python does not have the capability to parse JSON and importing libraries is forbidden for security reasons (unless you self-host n8n—an additional advantage of self-hosting). Therefore, we will be going with JavaScript.

Select “Run Once for All Items” as its mode and enter the code below:

const response =  $input.first().json.content[0].text // adjust to your actual field name
const jsonStr = response.replace(/^```json\s*|\s*```$/g, '').trim();
const data = JSON.parse(jsonStr);
 
return [{
  json: {
    isProspect: Boolean(data.isProspect),
    emailSummary: String(data.emailSummary),
    firstName: String(data.firstName),
    lastName: String(data.lastName)
  }
}];

With this code block, we have:

formatted the text that was returned by the AI into an actual JSON
parsed it into 4 different variables (isProspect, emailSummary, firstName, lastName)

Now it’s time to use these variables. Add a new “If” node (found under the Flow section) and add only one condition: {{ $(‘Code in JavaScript’).item.json.isProspect }} is true.

Connection with Salesforce

Here’s where we finally use Salesforce. Before we add the Salesforce node to the end of the true segment of the If node, we need a client ID and secret from Salesforce. To obtain those, we need to create an External Client App (Connected Apps are deprecated with the Spring ’26 release). Go to your org, then go to Setup → App Manager. Click New External Client App.

Enter the app name and contact email (this can be your email). Under the API (Enable OAuth Settings) section, tick the Enable OAuth checkbox. Once the other fields pop up, enter https://oauth.n8n.cloud/oauth2/callback as the callback URL (if you are self-hosting, it will depend on your domain). In the OAuth Scopes section, select these scopes:

Full access (full)
Perform requests at any time (refresh_token, offline_access)

Configuring Your Salesforce Connected App

In the Flow Enablement section, select Enable Authorization Code and Credentials Flow. Under OAuth Policies, make sure the following settings are checked:

Require Secret for Web Server Flow
Require Secret for Refresh Token Flow
Require Proof Key for Code Exchange (PKCE) Extension for Supported Authorization Flows

Save and enable your External Client App. Once you’re in the app page, go to Settings and find the Consumer Key and Secret button under App Settings. You will be asked to verify your identity by a verification code sent to your email. The Client ID and secret will then be revealed. More info about how to achieve an n8n-Salesforce connection can be found here.

Now add the Salesforce node (found under the “Action in an app” section) at the tail end of the True arm of the If node and choose Create a Lead as your action. n8n will ask for your credentials at the top of the screen. Click it and paste the Client ID and secret values to their appropriate fields.

You will then be prompted to self-authenticate with your username and password. If everything goes right, the integration will be complete. If you are met with a generic error, wait for 10-15 minutes before trying again or create a new External Client App from scratch and try to connect with that one.

Once the connection is done, you are now ready to trigger Salesforce through your workflow. Drag and drop the values returned from your Code node to their appropriate fields; that is, lastName in the Last Name field, firstName in the First Name field and emailSummary in the Description field. Since these are personal Leads, I chose to leave the Company field as “None”.

We don’t want to do anything when the isProspect value is false i.e. when the email sender is not a prospective client. Therefore, it is best to leave that arm blank.

This will conclude our workflow. At the end of it all, it should look like this:

Putting the Workflow to Test

Now let’s see how our workflow performs. Consider the email below:

I want to book your Grand Canyon tour.
Best regards,
John Salesforce

This email obviously expresses intent to book a tour package i.e. isProspect should be true when you run the workflow after you receive this email or when you send an email with this content to yourself. Make sure that it is the last email you have received before executing the workflow, since the last email will be fetched by the automation. Eventually, you should end up with a JSON returned from your AI node that looks like this:

[{"isProspect": true,
"emailSummary": "The sender is interested in booking the Grand Canyon tour package.",
"firstName": "John",
"lastName": "Salesforce"}]

The isProspect value is true, so the Salesforce node runs and returns the ID of the newly created Lead. You can then find that Lead in your org.

By combining n8n‘s visual workflow automation with Salesforce’s CRM capabilities, you can eliminate the repetitive manual work of creating Leads from incoming emails, no Apex code required. The workflow we built demonstrates how a non-developer can wire together Gmail, an LLM for intelligent sentiment analysis, and Salesforce into a seamless pipeline in a matter of minutes.

As Salesforce continues opening up its ecosystem through initiatives like Headless 360, pairing it with a flexible integration layer like n8n positions your team to move faster, reduce dependency on developers, and focus on what truly matters: converting those Leads into customers.

Thank you for reading and hope you liked this article!

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A New Start

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:13:56 +0000

Once, many years ago, I was sat in a budget hotel in Hamburg, thinking to myself “I don’t want to stop doing this”. It was the day after NEXT18, and my mind was buzzing with the ideas I’d been exposed to.

In particular, one of the closing talks by Indy Johar was stuck in my mind. It was one of those that I needed to continue exploring in my writing. He had given us the right questions, without any pretensions to delivering answers:

There are very few parts of the world that have the democratic infrastructure to have these conversations – but they are fundamental conversations. How we have them, and who we design for, will be profound. We are sitting at the precipice of war, famine, revolution, or another disaster. They change things. Can we avoid that?

I couldn’t imagine not being part of that conversation.

Planning for change

The conference had been a freelance client since 2012, and I knew that every conference, every piece I wrote for them could potentially be my last. But I know that if that day came, I’d want to carry on writing about those issues; to keep looking into the future and start conversations about what’s next.

That was the secret of the conference: unlike so many tech events, it was more interested in what today’s tech would do to society in 10 years, than about the latest app or startup. To take a day a week and look outside journalism, at how the world was changing, and what that means for all us, was a blessing I would rather not let go of.

So, I set up my fallback. A domain name that perfectly encapsulated the ideas I was thinking about. A Ghost install. And a steady flow of random pieces that didn’t really fit in with what I’m doing with One Man & His Blog, but which kept the domain (and its Google ranking) alive.

Change arrives. With coffee.

Today, I activate the plan. There’s been a strategic shift at Accenture, NEXT26 won’t be happening, and the site is, for now, on hiatus, while the lovely team decide what NEXT will be in the future.

And so, while that happens, I’m picking up where I left off. Drinking coffee. Exploring complexity. Charting a course to what’s next.

I didn’t want to stop doing this. It turns out I don’t have to.

But I really hope you’ll join me on the journey.

Campaign Optimization with Certified Google Ads Management

Thu, 14 May 2026 22:34:20 +0000

Read Time 6 mins | Written by: Copify

Get the best results from your online marketing with Copify Google Ads management. Our services help increase your advertising campaign’s ROI and eliminate unnecessary spending using data-based approaches.

Benefits of Google Ad Management for Your Business

Google ad management is most effective when conducted by experts. Their help can benefit your company and prevent wasting the ad budget. The advantages of our team’s managementservices include the following.

Major Revenue and Sales Increase

Precise identification of interested audiences and optimization of ads and accounts to efficiently target them allows your ads to attract more high-quality traffic, increasing conversions and sales.

Enhance Your Brand Awareness

White label GoogleAdsmanagement helps to identify your audience’s preferences to make your brand more relatable, increasing its reach. Raising brand awareness brings additional organic traffic and helps increase conversion rates.

Save Time and Money

Our team can quickly find the optimal solution to any marketing issue. Using time-efficient tools, we can use market data to give your marketing account a performance boost without wasting time and money on ineffective approaches.

Reasons to Hire Specialists for Google Ads Management Services

Expert GoogleAdsmanagementservices can help your business better navigate the complex field of paid advertising. Here are some reasons our agency can help you get the most out of your ads.

Understanding Client Goals and Budget

Deep market research gives us a good idea of what your customers want, how they engage with your ads, and how to optimize your strategy to match their preferences. The collected data also helps us choose the most cost-effective keywords and approaches that suit your budget.

Comprehensive Analytics, Creatives, and Expertise

Giving your ads our full attention allows us to react to the changes in performance, keeping their ROI and cost-efficiency in check. We continuously iterate your ads, making them more effective over time.

Advanced Targeting Techniques

Our team’s data-processing capabilities allow our GoogleAds PPC management to find the best approach to any audience. Using advanced targeting results in effective budget use, since your ads are only shown to people who are most likely to be interested in your services.

Google Ads Management Pricing

Copify GoogleAdsmanagement agency offers a full range of advertising services for any company. The total cost of our paid adsmanagement is determined by the scale of your campaign, your industry, and other factors.

Explore Ads Management Payment Plans

We offer a variety of payment plans for our services, including Google ad grant management. Our team’s personalized payment options allow small and large businesses to increase the benefits of their ads with effective solutions for any budget.

How Do Google Ads Managers Operate?

Google ad campaignmanagement is performed in several stages, allowing our agency to find the most optimal approach for every unique case. We create ads that give a quick initial result and continuously optimize them to maintain their benefits.

1. Campaign Analysis and Implementation

Configuring your GoogleAds manager account to better suit the needs of your campaign will help to streamline all further steps of the advertising strategy.

2. Keyword Optimization and Audience Targeting

Finding the most effective keywords used by your audience will make your ads visible only to highly convertible traffic. We search for keywords with great performance and acceptable costs, allowing your campaign to give great results at any budget.

3. Unique Content Creation

Using the data and keywords gathered during market research, our team creates a variety of content that will help your ads attract your audience’s attention and guide them to your site.

4. Ad Testing and Tracking

Creating several variations of the ads using different approaches and keywords and testing them with your target audience helps us discover the best methods of increasing your ROI and profits.

Why Choose Copify as Your Google Ads Management Agency?

Copify GoogleAdsmanagement company is an expert in creating Google advertising campaigns that help businesses quickly increase their sales and brand value.

Our Approach as a Google Premier Partner

Our team’s personalized approach to managing Google ad accounts has gained us the status of a Google Partner. This demonstrates our ability to create high-performing advertising campaigns that give great returns.

Case Studies and Client Success Stories

Our case studies can help you learn more about our process and the potential benefits of partnering with us.

Tips for Effective Google Ad Campaign Management

Effective managementGoogleAds requires using a variety of approaches as the market conditions change. The following advice will help to make your campaigns give better results.

Focus on Negative Keywords

Using negative keywords will help to avoid users who do not readily convert to customers. These keywords are used to list searches for which you do not want your ads to appear.

Implement Smart Bidding Strategies

Smart Bidding allows automatically adjust your bidding using machine learning algorithms. This helps to make timely changes to bidding strategies when manual control is not feasible.

Prioritize Quality Score

Quality Score shows how relevant your content is compared to your competition. It can help to quickly determine if your marketing approach is effective or whether you should make changes to your account to avoid wasting your budget.

FAQ about Google Ads PPC Management

What Are Google Ads Management Services?

These services are used to manage your GoogleAdsaccount, choose cost-effective keywords, create effective ads that meet your customer’s demands, and get more conversions and interactions at a lower cost.

How Do I Manage My Google Ads?

The best way to manage your ads is to hire an expert agency that will be able to maximize your campaign’s effects within your ad spend.

What Is Google Ad Manager?

Google Ad Manager is a platform for creating and managing large-scale marketing campaigns that use several advertising networks.

How Much Do Google Ads Management Services Cost?

The costs can vary depending on what results you want to achieve, your ad spend, chosen keywords, your business industry, and many other factors.

Why Use Google Ads Management?

Managing a GoogleAdsaccount requires making choices that do not give immediate results. Without experience and knowledge of the system’s inner workings, you are more likely to spend time and money on ineffective advertising.

Why Choose Google Ads Manager?

Google Ad Manager is a great choice for big businesses since it allows for greater control over their large-scale advertising campaigns.

Can I Manage Google Ads Myself?

You can manage your advertising campaigns by yourself. However, since each ad must be paid per click, you won’t get the best results without extensive market research, so hiring an agency is the best choice for efficient use of your advertising budget.

How Do Google Ads Work?

Google offers a variety of ad formats to use. Most ads are displayed to users who match the targeting options chosen for the ad or use keywords you choose to bid on for your advertising.

Is Managing Google Ads Easy?

Managing online advertising is a time-consuming process that requires constant attention to give the best results. It also requires technical knowledge of the advertising networks used, as well as experience with marketing.

Do You Need Google Ad Manager?

Using Google Ad Manager for your advertising strategy can be a good choice if you are a large business that uses several ad networks to conduct your marketing.

How do I pay for Google Ads?

You have various payment options for Google Ads, including credit/debit cards, bank transfers, and automatic payments. Charges are based on your campaign’s spending and performance. Benefit from our attentive support as we assist you in navigating payment options and optimizing your campaigns.

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The post Campaign Optimization with Certified Google Ads Management appeared first on blog.copify.com.

Expand your Results with Professional Google Ad Services

Thu, 14 May 2026 22:34:20 +0000

Read Time 7 mins | Written by: Copify

Are you ready to guide your business toward more tremendous success? Leave your Google Ad services in the capable hands of our expert team. We’ll pinpoint the right keywords, manage everything seamlessly, and deliver impressive results that propel your efforts. Discover the impact our professional ads expertise can bring to your strategy.

Understanding the Importance of Google Ads Services

Discover GoogleAds’ transformative potential for business growth. With our expert management, your campaigns will reach new heights, driving unparalleled results and maximizing your online presence. Experience the impact of our services firsthand, enhancing your visibility and expanding your reach with targeted keyword optimization.

Services for all types of businesses

Our services are tailored to perfectly match the needs of your business, regardless of its size or industry. From startups to established enterprises, Copify customizes campaigns to ensure optimal outcomes, helping you achieve your goals efficiently.

Attract your perfect customers with Google Ads

Tap into the effectiveness of targeted Google Ads keywords and well-planned campaigns to attract your ideal customers. With our services, you’ll connect with the right audience, driving engagement and conversions that matter most to your business.

Effective budget management

Are you worried about overspending? Our expert team ensures effective budget management for your GoogleAdscampaigns. We optimize spending to maximize results, delivering exceptional ROI and keeping your business on track for success.

How Much Does Our Google Ads Service Cost?

With Copify, you’ll find clear payment plans customized to fit your budget and requirements, guaranteeing you receive the best return on your Google Ads investment. Get in touch with our committed team for customized support and guidance throughout the entire process.

Google Ads management payment plans

Our services provide various payment options to accommodate your financial preferences and Google Ads campaign goals. From monthly subscriptions to pay-per-click models, we offer adaptable solutions to your business requirements.

How Does Copify Google Ads Customer Service Work?

Are you curious about how our Google Ads customer services operate? At Copify, we are committed to providing tailored assistance that meets your enterprise’s specific requirements. Count on our dedicated team to assist you with every facet of your Google Ads campaign, guaranteeing the best outcomes and maximizing your return on investment.

Competitor and industry research

Gain a competitive edge with our in-depth competitor and industry research services. We analyze market trends, identify opportunities, and refine your GoogleAdscampaign strategy to outperform competitors and drive business growth.

Keyword analysis and targeting

Starting with our precise analysis and optimization techniques, we enable you to harness the effectiveness of targeted keywords. We ensure your GoogleAds effectively reach your target audience by strategically selecting relevant keywords, boosting visibility, and driving conversions for your endeavor.

Sales, leads and conversion tracking

Our advanced Google Ads tracking solutions enable you to monitor the success of your campaigns effectively. From overseeing sales and leads to analyzing conversion rates, our services provide valuable insights to help you measure Google Ads performance and make data-driven decisions confidently.

Ad copywriting, testing and tracking

With our team of expert copywriters, we ensure your message captures attention and drives engagement. Experience the difference with our comprehensive ads services Google, where rigorous testing and tracking methods optimize GoogleAds performance, delivering measurable outcomes that speak volumes about your brand’s success.

Types of Ads Used for Google Ads Management Services

Our Google Ads management services offer a variety of ad types tailored to your needs. From Google Search Ads to YouTube Ads, we tailor our services to meet your business goals and drive exceptional results.

Google search ads

Our services specialize in crafting and optimizing Google Search Ads campaigns. We ensure the right audience sees your ads by targeting specific keywords, which drives relevant traffic to your website and helps generate valuable leads for your venture.

Google display ads

Utilizing visually engaging Google Display Ads, our expert team enhances your brand visibility across the web. Through strategically placing Googleads campaigns on relevant websites and pages, we help you reach a broader audience and boost brand awareness, ultimately driving more traffic and conversions for your business.

Google shopping ads

Our Google Shopping Ads management services optimize product listings and bidding strategies to maximize ROI. We ensure your products stand out in Google Ads search results and attract qualified leads ready to purchase. Explore the full range of our specialized services today.

YouTube ads

Harness the immense potential of video advertising with our YouTube Ads campaign management solutions. From captivating ad copy to compelling visuals, we create engaging video ads that resonate with your target audience, driving brand engagement and increasing conversions on one of the world’s largest video platforms.

What are Google Local Ad Services?

Discover how Google’s local ad services can boost your business by connecting you with nearby customers through targeted advertising.We explore how these specialized Google ads can benefit your enterprise, driving local visibility and attracting valuable customers to your doorstep.

How to optimize Google local service ads?

Our tailored optimization strategies unlock the potential of your local ad services. Our skilled team excels in refining Googlekeyword targeting, budget allocation, and performance monitoring to enhance local visibility and drive impactful outcomes for your campaignmanagement.

Local service ads vs Google Ads

Local service ads focus on local customers actively seeking services, while conventional Google Ads target a broader audience. We thoroughly analyze Google‘stargeting capabilities, budget management, and ad formats, empowering your campaign to select the optimal solution aligned with your business goals efficiently.

Benefits of Google ads For Service Business

Google Ads opens exciting growth opportunities for service businesses, propelling them into the online forefront and drawing in motivated customers seeking their services. Harness the power of keyword optimization to maximize your ad’s reach and impact.

Expert marketing plan and goal setting

Our seasoned team designs personalized marketing strategies perfectly tailored to your Google Ads SEO services strategy objectives. With meticulous attention to detail and a clear vision for achievement, we expertly navigate the Google digital landscape, ensuring each campaign drives your project toward unmatched success.

Exclusive Google Ads beta opportunities

Access exclusive beta features before competitors, leveraging cutting-edge tools and insights to stay ahead of industry trends. Our service thrives on innovation, and with Google Ads beta opportunities, you’re always stepping ahead, ready to seize new opportunities and outshine the competition.

Individual campaign strategy and execution

We specialize in crafting customized Google campaign management strategies designed to elevate your brand above the noise of the digital landscape. By paying attention to every detail and using the right keywords, we create campaigns that connect with your audience, leading to more leads, conversions, and overall growth.

Why Trust Copify Google Ads Services Agency?

Choose Copify for personalized care and tailored strategies. Our individualized client approach prioritizes your success, ensuring satisfaction and growth in the competitive digital campaign services landscape.

Case studies and client experience

Explore our case studies and client testimonials, showcasing how our tailored Google campaigns, expert management, targeted keywords, and comprehensive services have driven exceptional results for brands like yours.

FAQ about Google Ad Service

What is a good budget for Google Ads?

A reasonable budget for Google ads depends on various factors like campaign goals, target audience, and competition in your industry.

How can I keep track of my campaign performance?

Monitor your campaign management performance using Google Ads’ comprehensive analytics tools. Look at essential metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on investment.

What's the difference between Google and PPC?

Google Ads is a platform that facilitates the creation and supervision of PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. Advertisers compete for keywords to showcase their ads on Google’s search results and affiliated networks.

What are remarketing ads?

Remarketing ads specifically target users who have engaged with your website or app before, ensuring your brand stays fresh in their minds and motivating them to revisit and take desired actions.

Who should use local service ads?

Local service ads are well-suited for professionals in industries like beauty, real estate, and healthcare. They allow them to connect efficiently with local clients seeking their services.

How much will | pay per lead with local service ads?

The cost per lead for Google’s local service ads varies depending on location, industry, and competition. Professionals typically pay for each qualified lead generated through the campaign management ads.

What is the minimum payment for Google Ads?

There is no minimum payment for Google Ads; advertisers set their budgets based on their campaign goals and can adjust spending as needed.

What is a good CTR?

A reasonable click-through rate (CTR) depends on various factors, but generally, a CTR above the industry average indicates effective ad performance and engagement with your target audience.

Is Google Ads easy to learn?

While Google Ads has a learning curve, its intuitive interface and comprehensive help resources make it accessible for users of all sizes to learn and master.

How do l use Google Ad services?

Utilize ad services to create, manage, and optimize campaigns targeting specific keywords, audiences, and locations to drive targeted traffic and achieve your business goals.

How do I pay for Google Ads?

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Maximizing ROI with Google Ads Consultant Services

Thu, 14 May 2026 22:34:20 +0000

Read Time 8 mins | Written by: Copify

Get the results you want from your Google ad campaigns with the help of Copify GoogleAds consultant. Our team focuses on effective customized approaches that help you make the most out of your ad spend.

Google AdWords Consultant Services Overview

GoogleAds consultants offer several types of services aimed at planning, creating, and refining all types of Googleads. The comprehensive approach to Google advertising allows you to get new marketing opportunities and increase your ROI.

Paid Campaign Analysis And Implementation

Planning effective campaigns is impossible without research. A Google PPC consultant will gather data about your audience’s preferred keywords, competitor strategies, and other information to create an effective framework for ad creation.

Search Network Advertising

Search networkads allow your site to appear at the top of searchresults when your audience uses relevant keywords. This increases the likelihood of interested users finding your products.

Ad Variation And Testing

GoogleAdWord consultants use ad testing to determine which ad variants perform better, continuously refining your campaign’s performance.

How Google AdWords Experts Operate

Google AdWords consultation firms work in a process that helps get your GoogleAdscampaigns running effectively in the fastest time. The process includes the following steps.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is used to determine which keywords will have the best effect on your campaign, balancing performance with price.

Campaign Setup

Google Ads consultation firm will set up your Google Ads account to make it easier to follow your marketing strategy and campaign progress.

PPC Campaign Management

The agency will constantly monitor your ads’ performance, adjusting their parameters to maximize conversion rates and ROI.

Bid Management

Keyword prices are constantly changing. The agency will manage your bidding to ensure your campaigns always work with the optimal spending rates.

The Importance of Google AdWords Consultants

Allowing a consultant AdWords to manage your campaigns brings you many marketing benefits, such as those listed below, making partnering with one important for businesses that want the best advertising results.

Boost Leads And Sales: Expertly implemented campaigns attract users who are the most likely to make a purchase, increasing your sales and ensuring you don’t waste your money on advertising to uninterested audiences.

Enhance Conversions:AdWord consulting helps you gather conversion data to help determine which approaches work and make your ads more effective at converting visitors into customers.

Implement Remarketing Strategies:Targeting your past customers is an effective approach for getting more sales. An expert consultant can help you find the best method of reaching these users.

Increase Brand Awareness:GoogleAds can make your brand more visible and lead to more organic traffic as a result of increased awareness among your target audience.

Pricing for Google AdWords Consulting Services

The prices of hiring Google advertising consultants depend on several criteria and will depend on your campaign’s requirements.

How Much Do Google Ads Cost?

The cost of GoogleAds depends on your business industry, level of competition over keyword bids, location, and other criteria. Our agency will focus on choosing the parameters that help you achieve your goals without overspending.

What Are the Charges for Google Ad Consultants?

An AdWords consultant Google can offer several types of payment plans, such as monthly fee or per-project payments to better suit the needs of your business. The total charges will depend on the chosen payment plan.

Advantages of Hiring a Google Ads Consulting Specialist

Hiring an expert consultant Google AdWords helps make your marketing campaign much more likely to give great results.

Increase Your Profits

Google advertising consulting increases your profits by attracting new and returning customers, making your brand more recognizable, and optimizing bidding costs. This maximizes your chances of getting a sale and gives quick profit increases.

Receive Consultation and Account Audit

An agency can review your existing campaign to help you discover and fix any issues it may have. This helps to increase its effectiveness and bring down running costs.

Get Detailed Campaign Analysis

Our campaign analysis uses data-based approaches to discover real performance criteria, allowing you to see exactly how your GoogleAds help you increase your profits.

Access Real-Time Reports

We offer regular reports that detail your strategy’s progress and provide advice for further improvements.

Why Choose Copify as Your Consultant for Google Ads Optimization?

CopifyGoogle AdWords consultancy can help any business create effective GoogleAdscampaigns that give quick results. Our services have been used by companies from many industries, allowing us to quickly identify the best approach for your needs.

Extensive Experience

As a Google AdWords certified consultant, our agency has extensive experience finding the best methods to achieve your goals.

Delivering Reliable Results

Our help has allowed many businesses to get consistent increases in their GoogleAdscampaigns’ performance.

Monthly Management Services

We offer a variety of payment plans, including affordable monthly billing options.

FAQ Google Ad Consultant

What Is a Google Ads Consultant?

A GoogleAds consultant is an agency that can create and optimize effective ads displayed on Googlesearches and compatible websites.

How Can I Earn Money from Google Ads?

Your company can get more customers and sales through expert Google marketing, increasing your profits and maximizing ROI.

What Is the Cost for 1,000 Views on Google Ads?

The cost of 1,000 views can vary depending on keyword prices, with the average cost of $7 and $20.

What Is the Revenue for 1 Million Ad Views?

As with ad costs, potential revenues can vary and depend on many factors. The total money depends on location, campaign scale, and other criteria.

Should I Hire a Google Ads Expert?

Getting the help of a Google marketing expert is the best way to make your advertising budget give your business the most benefit.

How Can Google Ads Consultants Help Businesses Grow?

Googleads increase revenue and brand value, leading to quicker business growth.

Why Are Google Ads More Effective?

Google is the most popular search engine, making advertising using its frameworks a rational choice for businesses that want to reach as many interested users as possible.

What Is the Quality Score System?

A Quality Score is a metric that helps you determine how well your ads are working by comparing them to your competitors and helping you determine how well they are helping you achieve your goals.

What Are the Components of a Successful Google Ad?

An effective Google Ad can capture the attention of your target audience, uses relevant keywords, and has a good price-to-performance ratio.

How Do Google Ads Compare to Facebook Ads?

Some GoogleAds are similar to Facebook ads. Others contain only text and are displayed directly in the searchresults. The performance of Googleads compared to Facebook depends on your type of business.

Is Landing Page Optimization Necessary?

Landing page optimization helps to increase conversion rates by making your pages easier to use and can influence your PPC campaigns by giving you a higher search engine rating.

Who Needs AdWords Consultancy?

GoogleAds firms provide services that work for any business that needs an effective digital marketing strategy.

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The post Maximizing ROI with Google Ads Consultant Services appeared first on blog.copify.com.

Blog Copify Google Ads Management Services

Thu, 14 May 2026 22:34:20 +0000

Read Time 12 mins | Written by: Copify

Increase your site’s traffic and profits with Copify Google Ads management services. Our team of experts can help your campaign’s ads reach more customers and increase your brand recognition.

To make the most out of any eCommerce site, a solid marketing plan is essential to establish your brand and spread the word. Digital marketing is a different beast than traditional marketing, and eCommerce sites should learn to embrace these differences to really make an impact online.

In this article, we take a look at how to do digital marketing for eCommerce websites, with a range of strategies and tools to grow your online business.

Why Choose Google Adwords Management Services?

Google Adwords management service is the best choice for getting reliable marketing campaign results. We use several data-based approaches to maximize your ROI when creating and optimizing your ads.

Deep Understanding of Your Business: Our campaign management process starts with gathering data about your business’ industry, best-performing keywords, and competition, allowing us to create ads that meet the requirements of your audience and company.
Reliable and Experienced Professionals: Well-versed in creating and optimizing any type of Google ads, our professional team can quickly create a marketing approach that will help you get the best returns without overspending.
Campaigns that Boost Revenue: Our Google Adword Services are designed to create strategies that help your ads reach the most interested users and increase conversions. This increases your sales and lowers your ad costs, helping to boost your profits.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization Google Ads managment service can be used to determine which of your ads or approaches do not generate sufficient conversions for their cost and optimize them to increase your sales.

Comprehensive Industry Analysis

Our industry analysis can help your campaign benefit from the latest market trends. We collect a variety of data about your competition, keywords, and other factors to give your campaign an immediate boost.

Ongoing Campaign Support

We continuously monitor the changes in your ads’ performance and make edits to guarantee the best results. Our experts can maintain and increase the campaign’s effectiveness to help you outpace your competitors.

In-Depth Keyword Research

Extensively researching keywords helps to make our Adwords management services more cost-effective and helps increase your campaign’s reach. Well-chosen keywords prevent low-quality traffic from interacting with your ads, decreasing the cost per conversion.

Effective Landing Page Design

The technical aspects and design of the landing pages have a big influence on your ads’ performance. Our team can help your landing pages become more attractive to your target audience and make them more likely to become your customers.

Customer and Audience Match Targeting

Our customer match targeting will help your campaign reach more users with similar interests and needs as your existing customers, giving you more quality traffic and chances to increase your sales.

Persuasive Ad Copywriting

Our team will create an effective copy that reflects your audience’s preferences, uses relevant keywords, and works in tandem with your landing pages to drive your profits.

Targeted Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising is an effective complement to search engine ads. We use the collected data to determine the best targeting parameters to discover previously untapped traffic through social media campaigns.

Strategic Email Marketing

Email marketing helps to give your customers and audience more information about your new products and offers to increase interest in your services.

What are the Costs of Google Ppc Management Services?

The cost of Google Ads PPC management depends on your campaign goals and the types of ads and keywords you use. Our flexible pricing options can be customized to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, ensuring the optimal price for creating a campaign that meets your marketing objectives.

Transparent Google Ads Management Pricing: Our Google Ads management packages contain services with clear costs, ensuring you know what you are paying for. Furthermore, we offer detailed reports that describe how and what of our services have helped increase your ads’ performance.
Performance-Based Fees:We offer performance-based plans, allowing you to pay only for the actual improvements in your marketing performance. This guarantees you will only spend money on positive outcomes.

Google Ad Management Services: Our Process

The process we use for our AdWords campaign management services is customized to give you fast results without any unnecessary spending.

Research and Strategy Development

Research is important for the effective use of paid ads and keywords. During our strategy developing stage, we will gather and evaluate various information to choose the best keywords and approaches for your campaign.

Google Ads Campaign Setup

Setting up and configuring your Google Ads account to make it easier to implement the developed strategy ensures quicker results and helps coordinate further optimizations.

Ad Testing and Performance Tracking

We use ad testing for our professional Google Ads management to determine the best advertising approach among several possibilities. Gathering performance data of several ads allows us to focus on using only the best of them.

Continuous Optimization and Reporting

After creating and launching your campaign, we will keep on optimizing and editing it as new data comes in. This makes it more effective over time and gives you information that helps make future marketing efforts more effective.

Why Choose Google Ads Campaign Management Services at Copify?

Blog Copify Google PPC management company is one of the best partners for businesses that need a professionally implemented Google Ads campaign. Our extensive experience and knowledge of search engines’ inner workings give you the best results in record times.

Google Adwords Campaign Management Services FAQ's

What Do Google Ads Management Services Entail?

Google ads services are used to create an effective strategy that uses keywords and audience preference data to make your marketing reach your objectives.

What Is the Cost of Having Someone Manage Your Google Ads?

The costs for managing any type of paid ads can vary widely. They will depend on keywords’ bidding, location, and many other factors that can’t be predicted without knowing your industry.

Is It Beneficial to Hire Someone for Google Ads Management?

Managing paid ads requires constant attention to keep them running at the best cost-to-performance ratio. An expert agency is the best choice for most companies without an in-house online marketing team.

What Do Google Ad Services Include?

The services can include researching keywords, ad testing, ongoing optimizations, and other types of approaches that help you reach your campaign’s goals.

Are Google Ad Services Free?

Neither Google ads nor management are free. Google ads are a form of paid advertising, which means you pay for every click, even if you do it yourself. Hiring marketing experts who can deliver reliable results also means spending money.

What Does Ads Management Involve?

Our team will create a strategy that will consider the needs of your business and the audience’s preferred keywords to choose effective approaches that will increase your profits.

Are Google Ads Too Expensive?

In general, the cost per conversion for any type of online marketing is lower than for traditional advertising. Our team will focus on choosing cost-effective approaches and keywords for your campaign so that you can get great results even on a small marketing budget.

Can You Manage Google Ads on Your Own?

You can create and manage your business’ ads, but without constant attention and insider knowledge, you are unlikely to get the performance possible when hiring an expert agency.

Who Can Benefit from Google Ad Manager?

An ad manager can help any type of business get more sales, make their brand more recognizable, and find new audiences.

Is Managing Google Ads Difficult?

Effectively managing Google ads requires having detailed knowledge of how they work and the ability to gather many types of data to find the best course of action for maximizing marketing results.

Who Owns a Google Ads Account Legally?

The entity with administrative control over the account is its legal owner.

Are Google Ads Worthwhile for Small Businesses?

Paid ads are a perfect method for small businesses to target only those users who are likely to make use of their services.

What Is the Monthly Cost of Google Ads?

The monthly cost of your ads will depend on how many of them you use, prices for keywords, and other factors. The average business can expect to spend about 500 USD on their ads.

Is AdSense the Same as Google Ad Manager?

These are separate products, though they have similar uses. AdSense is an ad network, while Ad Manager is an ad platform.

How Does Google Ads Differ from Google Ad Manager?

Google Ad Manager is primarily a tool that helps publishers coordinate ads that appear on a variety of supported sites. Google Ads allow advertisers to display adverts using Google search and display networks.

Are Google Ad Agencies Worth the Investment?

They can give great returns to any business and are suitable for investment if you need faster growth.

Codeless Way to Include External Directory in Sitemap | Digging Into WordPress

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:22:48 +0000

As of version 5.5, WordPress automatically generates an XML sitemap for your site’s content. The sitemap benefits your site by providing a simple “map” of all posts, pages, categories, tags, and more. This is useful for bots and humans, and is considered beneficial for SEO and even GEO. Even better, WordPress makes it easy to customize your sitemap as desired. For example, if you want to include or exclude certain pages, or even disable the WP sitemap completely, there are programmatic techniques (i.e., code snippets) for making it happen.

Add a directory without code

Now that we’re on the same page, so to speak. This quick DigWP tutorial explains how to add an external directory to the auto-generated WordPress sitemap. And by “external”, I’m referring to any directory that is not under the purview of WordPress (based on its URL). More specifically, any directory or folder that you add manually to your site’s files.

Step 1: Requirements

Okay let’s dig into it. For this non-code trick to work, the main requirement is that your site has permalinks enabled (via the WordPress General settings ▸ Permalinks). So instead of query-string-based URLs:

https://example.com/?p=123

..your site’s rocking keyword-rich “pretty” URLs:

https://example.com/ai-will-replace-the-internet/

Other than permalinks, there are two other caveats:

Directory name consists of alphanumeric, underscores, and hyphens
Directory location is within the site’s root directory

These requirements are explained further as we continue with the tutorial..

Step 2: Add a directory

Next add a directory to your WordPress site. Anywhere in the root directory of your site. For example, when I moved my shapeSpace WordPress theme from its own domain to Perishable Press, I added a directory named /shapespace/ to the site’s root directory. So the resulting directory path is this:

https://perishablepress.com/shapespace/

Important: for this non-code technique to work, the folder name must consist of only alphanumeric characters, underscores, and/or hyphens.

Step 3: Add new Page

Next, visit the WordPress Admin Area and create a new page (via Pages ▸ Add Page). Make sure that the page has a URL/permalink slug that matches your directory path. So continuing with the /shapespace/ directory example, we would add a new page that is named shapespace, which results in a permalink URL that matches the external directory. So both the directory and the newly added page have the same URL:

https://perishablepress.com/shapespace/

That’s all there is to it. Once you publish the new page, WordPress will do its thing and automatically add the new URL to your XML sitemap.

Check it out..

As long as the external directory and WP Page have the same URL, your WordPress sitemap will include a link to your directory. And when you (or anyone, anything) follows the link, they will be taken to the directory, not the WordPress Page. To get a better idea of how it works, check out the pages sitemap at Perishable Press, and follow the link to the external /shapespace/ directory. Instead of pointing to the blank WP Page, the sitemap link points to the shapeSpace directory, which serves the shapeSpace homepage.

A few final notes

This “codeless” way of adding directories to the WP sitemap works seamlessly. The new URL appears in your site’s local search results and links to the external directory (not the blank WP Page). That means the contents of the WP Page never are displayed anywhere on the front end of your site. So you can add a note or whatever reminding your future self why this otherwise empty page exists ;)

Note: This no-code technique works whether WordPress is installed in the root directory or subdirectory. Just FYI.

And of course, the main benefit of adding a directory to your sitemap is so the search engines can find it, pick it up, and include it in the search results. And that’s just smart SEO.

What about adding files?

Does this tricksy non-code technique also work with external files (instead of directories)? Not really, because of the limitations in how permalinks are formatted. For example, permalinks end with a forward slash /, file names do not. Also special characters like periods/dots that are included in file names are not included in permalinks. So if you add an external file named external-file.html, the closest you can get with a static page name is /external-file-html/, which won’t work for the sitemap trick.

Fortunately you always can add files and directories and just about anything using the Sitemaps API now included in WordPress core :)

How to Disable All Automatic Updates (WordPress Core, Plugins, and Themes) | Digging Into WordPress

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:30:46 +0000

Everyone has their own preference when it comes to automatic updates. Many folks like the idea of saving time and not having to “do” anything when updates are available. The problem is that updates don’t always go as planned. Unexpected things happen, conflicts, bugs, etc. Best-case scenario you save some time. Worst-case scenario your site goes down. Personally, I prefer to disable automatic updates for all the things: WordPress core, plugins, and themes. To do it, I use the following code snippets..

Disable automatic updates via constants
Disable automatic updates via filter hooks

Disable automatic updates via constants

This is the code snippet that I add to every site to turn off ALL automatic updates. Added via the wp-config.php file, just before the line that says, “That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging.” Here is the magic code:

// Disable auto-updates for EVERYTHING
define('AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED', true);

// Disable auto-updates for WP CORE
define('WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false);

// Disable auto-updates for PLUGINS & THEMES
define('CORE_UPGRADE_SKIP_NEW_BUNDLED', true);

Here we define three constants. The first constant disables all automatic updates. So technically that’s all you need. The second constant disables auto-updates for the WordPress core. The third constant disables auto-updates for plugins and themes. It’s as simple as that, and it just works.

Notes

By changing the values of the constants, you can define other configurations for automatic updates. For example, you can enable core updates while disabling plugin/theme updates and vice versa. In fact, the WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE constant may be one of three possible values:

true – All updates (major, minor, and dev) are enabled
false – All updates (major, minor, and dev) are disabled
'minor' – Only minor updates are enabled (major & dev are disabled)

The other two constants, AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED and CORE_UPGRADE_SKIP_NEW_BUNDLED, are strictly boolean (true or false).

Also note that “dev” updates only happen on sites running a development version of WordPress.

Disable automatic updates via filter hooks

Instead of using constants, it’s possible to configure automatic updates using filter hooks. Going the “filter” route is somewhat more flexible. Best advice is to go with constants via wp-config.php if you simply want to disable automatic updates. For alternate configurations, using filters gives you more granular control over each aspect of the update process.

Note: The code snippets below can be added via must-use plugin or custom code. Do NOT add any of the following code directly to wp-config.php.

Here are the filters that may be used to configure automatic updates:

// Disable auto-updates for EVERYTHING
add_filter('automatic_updater_disabled', '__return_false');

// Disable auto-updates for WP CORE
add_filter('auto_update_core', '__return_false');

// Disable auto-updates for PLUGINS
add_filter('auto_update_plugin', '__return_false');

// Disable auto-updates for THEMES
add_filter('auto_update_theme', '__return_false');

// Disable auto-updates for TRANSLATIONS
add_filter('auto_update_translation', '__return_false');

As written here, these filters all return false, which disables their respective auto-update feature. To instead enable any update feature, simply replace __return_false with __return_true.

Notes

The auto_update_core filter disables all core-related updates: major, minor, and dev. For more granular control, you can use the following alternate filters:

allow_dev_auto_core_updates
allow_minor_auto_core_updates
allow_major_auto_core_updates

These filters do exactly what their names imply. For more details, check out this WordPress article. As explained there, even when disabling auto-updates using auto_update_core and related filters, WordPress will continue making HTTP requests to the update endpoints:

https://api.wordpress.org/core/version-check/...
https://api.wordpress.org/plugins/update-check/...
https://api.wordpress.org/themes/update-check/...

If you want to stop WordPress from checking for updates, you can add the following code via must-use plugin, regular plugin, or via functions.php:

// Stop HTTP requests checking for updates
remove_action('admin_init', '_maybe_update_core');
remove_action('admin_init', '_maybe_update_plugins');
remove_action('admin_init', '_maybe_update_themes');

That’s all for now, I hope this tutorial helps you in your WordPress adventures :)

Mobilizon: 聚集，组织，动员

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 06:12:44 +0000

我戒除微信群聊已经快半年了，除了偶尔有些朋友会打电话给我，确认我还健在之外，我的生活清净了很多。没有微信群聊，通信工具还有很多，这里不一一列举。我最喜欢的是电子邮件，好处是自主可控。但微信群聊有一些功能超越了通信的范畴，例如社区建设，朋友约会搞活动之类，对于这些功能，有没有什么更好的替代品呢？

有的。本文介绍的Mobilzon 就是。

功能简介

mobilizon

Mobilizon是一个小型网页应用，最主要的功能是组织线上或线下活动，另外还包含简单的群组功能，如讨论组，组内活动，信息发布等。它是完全的自由软件，谁都可以自行搭建一个实例，实例和实例之间可以还联网，也就是所谓的Federation。

最近由于Twitter名声不好，有一个类似Twitter的自由软件很火爆，叫Mastodon (长毛象），可能不少人听说过。Mobilizon和Mastodon类似的地方在于都是自由软件，都可以组Ferderation，但不同点在于，Mobilizon不是一个社交媒体，而只是一个社交工具，它没有点赞，转发，关注等能给你带来满足感，虚荣心和焦虑感的数据统计，更没有智能推荐，排行榜，无限滚动等功能来抓住你的关注。它就是一个工具，从小里说你可以用来和朋友约一起吃饭，从大里说你可以和陌生人约一起示威游行等大型群体活动。干什么随你。

Mobilizon是一个web应用，暂时没有原生的手机应用。但是，Mobilizon的手机网页版优化的非常不错，功能上不比桌面网页版差。读过我手机应用还是信息监狱？一文的朋友知道我对手机应用不以为然，Mobilizon也证明了我的观点：手机网页版其实可以做的够好。

Mobilizon的主要作者是一些法国人，来自一个非政府组织FramaSoft。他们开发Mobilizon的初衷是对标Facebook里的主页，群组，活动功能，做一个有节操的自由软件，让人们能脱离垄断性商业平台的束缚。目前除英语法语之外，主要欧洲语言的翻译已经比较完备。我正在做简体中文的翻译工作，估计一两周内，简体中文的翻译覆盖将达到主要欧洲语言的水平。

我的实例

作为技术控的我，当然不会满足于做一个简单用户这么没创意。所以，我搭建了自己的实例，放在自己的服务器上：mob.roastidio.us，欢迎大家光临，目前对全网开放注册。我就是这里的管理员，我的用户名是 @derek，有事可以 @ 我哦。你可以把上面网址加入书签，爱用手机的朋友还可以发送上面网址到Home screen，这样还能达到PWA的效果，一点即入，全屏无地址栏，近似原生应用。

再说明一点，这个实例和吐槽俱乐部roastidio.us除了一级域名共享之外其实没有内在关系。这是百分百的自由软件，我除了配置文件之外，一个字符都没改，一个字符也不准备改。想改的话我自然会给上游发patch。请大家放心使用。

Mobilizon虽然没有改，但吐槽俱乐部是我写的，所以我对吐槽俱乐部做了一点点改动。之前，吐槽俱乐部一直有一个小的使用上的不足：它不提供头像上载功能，而依赖于Social Login 或 Gravatar 来载入头像。对于不能或不愿意使用Social Login 的用户来说，他们在吐槽俱乐部里一直没有定制头像显示。另外，有些用户也不是很喜欢邮件登录。现在，吐槽俱乐部的用户可以使用 mob.roastidio.us 的用户名和密码登录吐槽俱乐部，登录后直接带入你在mob.roastidio.us预设的头像，是不是就方便很多？

结束语

Mobilizon还没有中文名。我的想法是叫 江湖召集令 , 有更好的想法的朋友可以给我提建议，提建议的方法是在下面留言。

一定来mob.roastidio.us注册用户哦！

Gather ⋅ Organize ⋅ Mobilize — Mobilizon

My Recommendations | Eat Sleep Breathe FI

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 11:02:51 +0000

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Wealthsimple Cash*: Earn up to 4% interest on your savings (if you hold at least $100,000 in investments with Wealthsimple).
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Investing

Questrade*: My favourite Canadian brokerage (receive a $25–$250 bonus using my code: 816205072429040).
Wealthsimple Invest*: An easy, low-cost way to invest (receive a $50 bonus using my link)!
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Credit Cards

Borrowell*: Check your Equifax credit score and credit report for free.
Credit Card Genius: Personalized Canadian credit card recommendations.
Rogers World Elite Mastercard: My favourite no-fee cashback credit card.

Utilities and bills

Backblaze*: Unlimited cloud-based backup for a very low annual price (we each get a free month of service when you sign up using my link).
Fongo Home Phone*: VoIP service for only $4.95/month (enter my email: chrissy@eatsleepbreathefi.com to give me one month of free service—thank you)!
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Estate planning

Bitwarden: Give loved ones access to your passwords and other secure digital info.
Epilogue Wills*: Simple, smart online wills that you can complete from the comfort of home.
Family Emergency Binder*: A fillable, printable binder to leave for your loved ones in case of emergency (read my detailed review for more info).
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Willful*: Online wills made easy (receive 10% off on any Willful plan when using my link).

Polipo and the GFW

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 07:11:11 +0000

Polipo is a web proxy. Together with ssh one can bypass the firewall to access website that cannot be directly visited, or to browse the web in an untrusted network to increase security. It is a very useful tool.

However, with China’s GFW, some rare condition may happen.

Typical usage

You are on machine a, and want to access website running on b. But the problem is a firewall is bloking you to do so. Luckily, you have access to aonther machine c on the other side of the firewall, that can access b. The only accss you have on c is ssh. With ssh and polipo you can setup a proxy on c, and expose it through ssh securely, so you and you alone can access it.

Polipo setup on c

There is nothing special; default seting should be ok. You will only need it to listen to a local port, default is 8123

SSH setup on c

Again, nothing special. For your safety, it is strongly recommended to use public key authentication, and public authentication only.

clieent side setup

all you need to do is:

ssh -L 8123:localhost:8123 MACHINEC

And you have a web proxy locally on port 8123 that can visit all the sites the c can visit.

HTTP and tunnel

Polipo is an HTTP proxy. It understands HTTP and can do a lot behind the scene.

caching. It caches files so the next time it does not need to fetch it for you.
multiplexing and pipelining. It reuse connection to the server for multiple clients to increase efficiency.

So, web performance is boosted and bandwidth is saved.

However, there is another method used to access the web, HTTPS. HTTPS is HTTP over SSL, so the communication is protected from end to end. Because it is end to end, none of the caching, multiplexing and pipelining can work. Polipo is a faithful HTTPS proxy as well; it does not do anything funny for HTTPS and just blindly forwarding a raw TCP connection. This is called a tunnel in polipo. The performance boosting features are no more; no caching, and client side connections and server side connections are 1 to 1 mapped and spliced.

China’s GFW

China is blocking a lot of content on the web. It blocks contents by:

DNS tricks
drop connection, at various stage

If polipo is within the GFW, it subjects to the same limitation as a normal web client such as a browser, however, it behaves slightly differently. We have observed 2 kinds of dropped connections because of the GFW:

connection dropped at the beginning. For the client this is the same as if the server is not online. For the majority of the block sites this is the common behavior.
connection dropped at the last stage of the TCP 3 way handshake. Some blocked sites, curiously google’s sites, are blocked this way.

And you have HTTP and HTTPS, which give you a 2x2 matrix. For HTTP the polipo will make the connection asynchronously and return errors of it own; and for HTTPS polipo will make the connection synchronously and the client will see the same effect as without the proxy:

case 1 HTTP. Polipo will return remote cannot be found.
case 2 HTTP. Polipo will return remote connection timeout.
case 1 HTTPS. no message is returned, but the client will see that remote site cannot be found eventually.
case 2 HTTPS. Your client will stuck for a while and timeout locally.

From the client point of view case 1 and case 2 HTTPS are the same but for polipo it is not. For case 2 HTTPS. polipo established a tunnel that is only half established. When client side timeout happened the server side is still at SYN_WAIT stage and will stuck here forever, there is no timeout. This is different from case 2 HTTP when polipo is a full HTTP and TCP client with timeout protection. The end result is leaked file descriptors. WHen the leak accumulates large enough polipo will be out of file descriptors, and stop functioning.

Remedy

It is a polipo bug. Upstream may take sometime to fix but in the meantime I can only do:

block google within polipo, so case 2 HTTPS does not happen as often.
restart polipo periodically.

It is sad that the GFW causes yet another grief.

LDAP and Kerberos

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 02:38:46 +0000

Two of the core problems in running a IT environment are authentication and authorization. Authentication is the process of proving one’s identity to others, and authorization is the process of granting rights to the individual based on the proven identity. Although the 2 tasks are clearly defined, they are deeply related. The best tools for authorization and authentication are LDAP and Kerberos; which can work hand in hand and produce a nice and secure IT infrastructure. However, these tools are not fool safe and some understanding and configuration are needed.

LDAP

LDAP fundimentally is a database. It is a database built for a special purpose, which is to store a directory and associated data. Some rigidly defined schemas are provided so the data stored within are always consistant and consise. Among other things, group memberships, login shells and home directories are stored here so it can play a important role in the authroization process. Another good thing about using a centrally managed database is that it provide the same data for all hosts, services and users which is very nice for the administators.

LDAP can also store user password (as a security hash in most cases) so it can also act as a authentication backend. If password matches, LDAP can bind the user to a identity (DN in LDAP jargon); authentication frontends can leverage this capability so all passwords can be centrally stored and unified; users only need to remember one password to access all services.

Kerberos

Kerberos is a tools for a single purpose, which is authentication. It aims to solve the following problems:

Not only users need to prove their identity, services need to do the same as well. (Rogue services that harvest password and other user information are not good)
Access shall have a time limit. (Shells left open for indefinitly are not good)
Transimission of password, even in a encrypted channel, is not secure.
Storing of password, even in an one way hash, is not secure.
Users don’t want to type passwords, even the same one, repeatly to access multiple services. (Single Sign On rules)

Their interaction

One can use LDAP or Kerberos, but for the best results you want to use Kerberos for authentication and LDAP for authorization. The tools can run seperately fufilling their jobs; or they can have stronger interactions:

Kerberos can use LDAP as a database backend.
LDAP can be kerberosized, which mean its access can be authenticated by kerberos
LDAP can use kerberos as a password checker, so simple bind still works, now with the kerberos password

1 does not provide new functionality; and unless you have a very large domain, one KDC with builtin database is good enough. So let’s skip that to avoid unnecessary complication. 2 is important because LDAP contains sensitive imformation; we want to make sure the authentication is secure.

Although 3 seems to downgrade kerberos back to simple password checker, it is actually very important:

Many services are not kerberosized, you still want to use the same password at least
It provides a smooth migration path, so services can gradually become kerberosized
Kerberosized services need kerberosized clients, which may not be available to your users

There is one downside, which is you cannot change password through the LDAP bridge (or any other bridge). It would be very insecure anyway. LDAP is not the only way to use kerberos as password checker, PAM and SASL are 2 other ways. However, LDAP is widely supported, for example in web services.

To configure LDAP and Kerberos is not easy and beyond the scope of this article.

Pointers to documents

Documents on how to setup LDAP (OpenLDAP) and Kerberos (MIT Kerberos) can be found in their websites:

Those documents are a little hard to follow though. There are some howtos on the web, one of them is:

http://www.rjsystems.nl/en/2100.php

Services and kerberos

Services that has to use Kerberos

OpenAFS

OpenAFS has to use Kerberos for authentication. Authorization is not based on LDAP though, it has it own authorization backend.

Services that can use Kerberos

The following services can be configured to use kerberos, and is recommended to do so.

PAM (Linux Login)

Actually login is half kerberos in this way. It use PAM, which takes passwords but verify the password with kerberos and grant you a ticket so you are in. If your ticket expired, you are still in the system, but without a ticket.

LDAP

You have to have a ticket first (using kerberos’s kinit or Linux login), and then you can access LDAP as the identiry proven.

NFS v4

With Kerberos identity (tickets) you can access NFS v4 that is configured with kerberos. Authorization (group membership) is often still done with LDAP.

SAMBA

Like NFS v4, Samba can use kerberos.

SSH

Like PAM, it can check password with kerberos and grant you access and a ticket. Better yet the ticket can be forwarded so once you are in you can login to other similiar configured host without a password. If you use public key to login then you will not have a ticket so you will have to kinit to get one.

Services that can use Kerberos, but likely not

Some services can be configured to use kerberos authentication, however due to the ubiquitousness of clients that do not support kerberos, the use of kerberos is impractical:

SMTP
IMAP
XMPP

Services that does not support Kerberos

Most web services do not support Kerberos. So most likely you have to rely on the LDAP bridge.

Webauth

webauth is a framework for web services to use kerberos as the authentification method. It is still SSL/cookie based; so it is very compatible with the current network environment, at the same time no more secure than simple password authentification. The real benifit is single sign on for all participating web services; too bad it is not widely used.

The documents is at: http://webauth.stanford.edu/weblogin-config.html To use webauth you need to have:

webkdc, which is a module running in apache. It hands out security cookies based on info obtained from kerberos
weblogin, which is a bunch a CGI scripts that handle login/logout/pwchange for the users. It communicates with the webkdc in the backend. weblogin is commonly run on the same apache server.
web services using webauth. By using webauth the services redirect the login/louout/pwchange requests to weblogin, and once logged in, the web services automatically have the username setup from an env variable by the webauth module. Also requires apache.

Do you have kerberos

Easy enough on the commandline:

derek@kclient:~$ klist
Ticket cache: FILE:/tmp/krb5cc_1000
Default principal: derek@SHANNON-DATA.COM

Valid starting       Expires              Service principal
10/09/2015 11:11:39  10/09/2015 21:11:39
krbtgt/SHANNON-DATA.COM@SHANNON-DATA.COM
renew until 10/10/2015 11:11:39
10/09/2015 11:11:48  10/09/2015 21:11:39
ldap/kerb.shannon-data.com@SHANNON-DATA.COM

derek@kclient:~$ ldapwhoami
SASL/GSSAPI authentication started
SASL username: derek@SHANNON-DATA.COM
SASL SSF: 56
SASL data security layer installed.
dn:uid=derek,ou=people,dc=shannon-data,dc=com

Watch out for the expiration:

derek@kclient:~$ krenew
krenew: error renewing credentials: Ticket expired

If that happens, you have to login again. There are ways for automatic renewal, but even that can be

Summary

LDAP and Kerberos combined is nice and secure. The setup is not easy and to use it you need to get used to a few things.

Streamlining Your Studio

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 18:00:08 +0000

Thanks for reading Streamlining Your Studio from TopMusic.co.

If the studio admin side of teaching is your favourite part, this blog isn’t for you. But if you’re like most other music teachers, you prefer the lessons. You want to put all your time and energy into helping your students grow into confident musicians…rather than fretting about scheduling and payments.

The post Streamlining Your Studio appeared first on TopMusic.co - Your Integrated Music Teaching Hub.

Site to Site VPN Using OpenVPN

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 21:52:42 +0000

You have 2 offices, it make sense to have a VPN to connect both sites together. OpenVPN is both easy to install and reasonably performant. It use a IP layer tunnel with UDP transport, with all traffic encrypted, so it is both transparent and secure. Howeever like any real world networking problem, there are traps.

Setup

Main office: public IP: 124.74.106.46 lan: 192.168.0.0/24 WAN gateway: 192.168.0.2 VPN gateway: 192.168.15

Branch office: No static public IP lan: 192.168.2.0/24 WAN gateway: 192.168.2.1 VPN gateway: 192.168.2.2

VPN network: 10.8.0.8/24

The procedure in http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/security/security-howto/30353-how-to-set-up-a-site-to-site-vpn-with-openvpn is easy enough to follow and clear, so I will not repeat here. the WAN gateways on both side are conmercial wireless routers and the VPN gateways are custom built PCs.

Problem 1

After setup the VPN gateway can ping each other, but other machines in the 2 LAN cannot. This is because the PC used as VPN gateways did not turn on packet forwarding among networking interfaces (a security measure, only routers need to forward packet). this is simple enough:

net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

in /etc/sysctl.conf will do. sysctl -p to make effective.

Problem 2

Now other machines can ping VPN gateways on the other side, but the VPN gateways cannot ping other machines on the other side. It turns out the VPN gateway will use the 10.8.0.* ip as source IP, so the return packet goes to the WAN gateway and it either drop them or throw it over to the WAN side. So you need to add route 10.8.0.0/24 to the VPN gateway on both side to the WAN gateway.

Problem 3

Now one side can connet to the other side with no problem, but not the other way! And things got even wierder, I can traceroute but not ping! It looks like the main office WAN gateway, a TP-link router, does something funny. Although I specifically added the static route to the VPN gateway, but:

regular packet got routed correctly
ICMP echo return and TCP return handshake got dropped
it does ICMP redirect for ping from the own side, but many OSs ignore ICMP redirect (for security)

It looks like some kind of firewall I cannot disable. The only way I can think of is to setup custom route rules for every machine, so the WAN router is not getting in the way.

for DHCP clients I can do that automatically since I already control the DHCP server
for manual setup machines you will have to do it manually.

Like:

ip route add 192.168.2.0/24 via 192.168.0.15
ip route add 10.8.0.0/24 via 192.168.0.15

Future work

Conmercial routers are good only when you stay with in the intended usage model. If I can do it all over again, I will ditch the router, and combine WAN and VPN gateway in one custom built pc; this way I have full flexibility. The router will be used as just a wifi AP on the side. For all the networking functionality the router provide:

DHCP. I already disable it from the router and use my own because I want to do PXE boot.
DNS. I already disable it from the router and use my own because I have many internal DNS need.
SNAT and DNAT. It can be done with free software; if you don’t miss the web interface.
firewall. It is very limited anyway.
UPnP. it is better to disable them anyway.
traffic shaping. I’ve never made it work the way I want it to be.

Block SPAM by Source

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 06:30:35 +0000

SPAM is a serious problem for any non-trival, internet facing email setup. At shannon, we receive on average 200+ SPAM per day, sometimes more than legitimate emails. There are ways to filter SPAM, such as content based filtering. However, they are resource intensive, and need human training to work best. It is important to know:

trying to filter all SPAM is both unrealisitic and not necessary
blocking legitimate emails is worse than letting some small amount of SPAM through.
the majority of SPAM arr generated by non-sophistic bot networks

So, a simpler and effective method to fight SPAM is to block them by SMTP source IP. This article explore several ways to accomplish this task and derived an effective ways to block the vast majority of SPAM.

Identifying SPAM sources

The majority of SPAM are coming from either professional SPAM network or botnet of hijacked residential PCs. Lucky there are ways to identify them by IP or the software driving them:

There are public database of known SPAMER network and IP range
They usually do not bother to setup proper forward and reverse DNS
The SPAMing softwatr are usually non-conforming SMTP source

A number of ways has been found to identify SPAM sources

spamhaus.net

spamhaus.net is a public database of known spammer network and ips. It provide free of charge, DNS based ways to query, and any ip flaged by it is very likely to be bad. There are also some downsides:

It may take some time to list new spammer IPs, which pop up everyday
Sometimes it is overloaded and fail to respond to our query

Reverse DNS

A legitimate SMTP host is supposed to have maching forward and reverse DNS record. Because the forward and reversed DNS are governed by seperate entitys there are some time delay and procesure to have everything setup correctly, SPAMMER usually do not bother to do that. Also, it is generally impossible to do that for residential IP blocks anyway. So one can do 2 DNS calls, first reverse (ip to DNS name) then a forward (DNS name to ip) to verify they matched up, then have a high confidence of the SMTP source is legitimate. However, there are also downsides:

Some legitimate domains do not have matching records (newbies)
Sometimes DNS query will timeout and cannot give you definate answers

Grey listing

Oftentime, the spamming software are poorly written and does not conform to standard. The idea of greylist is to establish whether a prior relationship exists between the sender and the receiver of a message. Most of the time it does, and the delivery proceeds normally. On the other hand, if no prior relationship exists, the delivery is temporarily rejected, using a 451 SMTP response. Legitimate MTAs will treat this response accordingly, and retry the delivery in a while. In contrast, ratware will usually fail to retry the delivery in a normal fashion. The downsides is the initial email would arrive late.

Combining all 3

We can combine all of the above to have a more robost SPAM blocking scheme:

first, use a white list to let high traffic known good sender ip pass
then, do reverse DNS and forward DNS. if it fails, go to 3. otherwise, skip to 4.
go through grey listing because the odd of SPAM is higher
finally, verify with spamhaus.net

The popular MTA exim can be configured as such fairly easily. SPAM traffic at shannon is reduced by 95%, with very little false positive.

The 1958 All-African People’s Conference Explained through the Zone Analysis Theory By Dr. Gnaka Lagoke - Toward Freedom

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 22:38:09 +0000

Introduction

Pan-Africanism is one area that African academics have shied away from for some time now. For this reason, faculty and students, across the continent, have little understanding of what it really means, and especially, when it started, and for what purpose. It is therefore important that African higher education institutions revisit the issue to place it back on the continental agenda because it is experiencing a resurgence.

Consequently, there is the need to show its importance and the significant contribution it made to African history, especially, the first major 1958 All-African People’s Conference. This has necessitated the attempt to look at the subject through the prism of the Zone Analysis Theory.

Pan-Africanism, born in the Americasis a phenomenon, which promotes freedom, unity, oneness and solidarity on the spiritual, cultural, social, political, and economic levels, social and racial justice, and self-determination of people of African ancestry. This movement won its first electoral and political victory in Africa in 1951 when Kwame Nkrumah, a staunch Pan-Africanist, became head of government business of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) after winning an election while in prison¹. Ghana became independent on March 6, 1957, as the first country in black Africa to rid itself from the shackles of colonialism.

One year after its independence, Ghana hosted two conferences, respectively for the already independent nations: the Conference of Independent African States and for the freedom fighters, i.e. the All-African People’s Conference. The latter was impactful and consequential. It was an inflexion point in the history of Africa. It ignited Pan-Africanism and accelerated the decolonization process.

In this article, I seek to discuss the success of the All-African People’s Conference, which took place December 8-13, 1958, through the prism of a Pan-African theory: the Zone Analysis Theory. While much of the literature in the field of Pan-Africanism is often done from a historicist perspective, I want to refocus our discussions of Pan-Africanism through theorization. A theory is an ideational framework—based on observation, interpretation, and everyday dynamics—that can elucidate historical, political, and cultural realities and can guide action and movements.

Africa could not host major Pan-African meetings before the independence of Ghana—it is for this reason that most of the Pan-African gatherings before the All-African People’s Conference took place outside the continent of Africa. Using the fundamentals of Nkrumah’s ideas, which were further developed by Zizwe Poe, I examine how a Pan-African liberated zone contributed to the expansion of Pan-Africanism and to the creation of Pan-African communities of struggle and shared thought—in short, Pan-African liberated zones.

The zonal analysis tenets were outlined by Kwame Nkrumah in his book Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare published in 1968 while he was proposing guidelines for successful revolutions in Africa. He divided Africa fighting for its freedom into three zones: liberated zones, contested zones and enemy-held zones². Zizwe Poe used some of the above-mentioned tenets to highlight the significance of independent Ghana as a free zone, a liberated one, which contributed to the advancement of Pan-Africanism, in his book Kwame Nkrumah’s Contribution to Pan-Africanism. He later articulated the Zone Analysis Theory in 2012³.

My analysis here will proceed in three parts. The first part discusses the origin and the fundamentals of the Zone Analysis Theory. To better explain the relevance of that Theory, I demonstrate in the second part of the study why most of the Pan-African gatherings, which took place before the independence of Ghana took place outside the continent of Africa in European capitals. The third part of the text examines the significance of the independence of Ghana and how it created the space that ignited Pan-Africanism in Africa and enabled the organization of a new series of Pan-African gatherings called the All-African people’s Conferences.

Zone Analysis Theory, a Pan-African Theory

The process of the Zone Analysis Theory formation can be divided into three steps: Kwame Nkrumah’s zonal classification, Zizwe Poe’s interpretation of Ghana’s independence as a liberated zone and his primary zonal theory articulation and my own contribution, which is providing a comprehensive definition of the Zone Analysis Theory and the categorization of the same theory.

The Zone Analysis Theory finds its relevance in relation to the historical context of colonization. The founding act of colonization was the Berlin Conference (1884-1885). It sealed the partition of Africa on paper. The golden rule adopted by the participants during the conference could be summed up in these terms: Any territory already occupied or conquered belongs to the conquering country’.⁴ By the beginning of the twentieth century, the entire continent of Africa, with the exception of Ethiopia and to a lesser extent Liberia created by the American Colonization Society for freed American slaves, was under colonial rule. Ethiopia was the only African country to have escaped colonialism after defeating Italy twice respectively at the Battle of Dogali in 1887, under Yohannes IV and at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 under Menelik II. ⁵

Events have had an impact on the decolonization of Africa and on the evolution of Pan-Africanism, namely World War II (WWII), the creation of the United Nations in 1945 and the Bandung Conference, which took place in 1955. The British colony of the Gold Coast (Ghana) became independent on March 6, 1957, through peaceful means.⁶ The war of independence of Algeria erupted in 1954 through an armed struggle. The Sharpeville Massacre of November 1960 led to the killing of 69 unarmed people. Freedom fighters were engaged in a series of armed struggles across the continent of Africa, from Southern Africa to the Portuguese colonies. Kwame Nkrumah himself was overthrown on February 24, 1966. In his Conakry years in exile, he published a manual of guerrilla warfare, Handbook Revolutionary Warfare: A Guide to the Armed Phase of the African Revolution, which provides the tools for the articulation of the Zone Analysis Theory. In the context of a revolutionary warfare, Kwame Nkrumah provides a classification of zones:

For although the African nation is at present split up among many separate states, it is in reality simply divided into two: our enemy and ourselves. The strategy of our struggle must be accordingly, and our continental territory considered as consisting of three categories of territories, which correspond to the varying levels of popular organisation and to the precise measure of victory attained by the people’s forces over the enemy:

1. Liberated areas
2. Zones under enemy control
3. Contested zones (i.e. hot points).⁷

The three zones (liberated zones, zones under enemy control, and contested zones) become the foundational pillars of the theory. Kwame Nkrumah goes on to argue that in a liberated zone, freedom is attained and obtained through a successful struggle or through a successful coup d’etat that can take out of power a neo-colonialist regime.⁸ Kwame Nkrumah suggests a strong cooperation between liberated zones and the liberation movements in the contested zones and in the enemy-held zones.⁹

The zones under enemy control or the enemy-held zones are completely subjugated and totally controlled by the oppressors, settler colonists, colonizers or neo-colonists who control all aspects of life of these zones, namely political, economic, cultural and military.¹⁰ The Ghanaian leader asserts that the revolutionary awareness of the masses determines the fate of the struggle. If and when it is high it is likely to lead to resistance, to « national boycotts, strikes, sabotage, and insurrection. » ¹¹Enemy-held zones can be easily transformed into contested zones if the revolutionary spirit can spark a successful revolt. Contested zones are transition zones that can be placed between the enemy-held zones and the liberated zones. In these zones, the oppressed and the oppressor are engaged in a battle, which determines if freedom can be attained or if oppression continues.

Building upon Kwame Nkrumah examination, Zizwe Poe, in his book Kwame Nkrumah’s Contribution to Pan-Africanism: An Afrocentric Analysis, emphasizes the significance of Ghana’s independence to the expansion of Pan-Africanism. He demonstrates the significance of the Ghanaian independence and presents Ghana as an example of a liberated zone or as « a Pan-African liberated zone.¹² » Zizwe Poe stresses that the primary goal of Ghana as the first Pan-African liberated zone was to help create or transform other colonies or free nations into Pan-African liberated zones. ¹³Zizwe Poe defines a liberated zone as « a zone from which to launch and support liberation. »¹⁴

In order to highlight the optimal dimension of Ghana as a purposive true Pan-African liberated zone, Zizwe Poe compares three liberated zones such as Haiti, Liberia and Abyssinia (Ethiopia), He presents the latter as a Pan-Africanist symbol of a liberated zone.¹⁵ He differentiates these Pan-African clusters from Egypt, which was a liberated zone but not a Pan-African liberated one from the outset. Egypt later evolved to turn into a Pan-African liberated zone. ¹⁶Zizwe Poe echoes the position of Vincent Bakpetu Thompson who declares that Ghana then offered what Liberia and Ethiopia could not provide: a safe-meeting place for the discussion of priorities.¹⁷ Thompson would also argue that in 1957 Ghana was the first to be independent in Black Africa and was therefore rightfully viewed as the beacon of hope, freedom, and unity of African nationalists.¹⁸

Building on what precedes, I now define the Zone Analysis Theory as a Pan-African Theory through which one can measure the environmental freedom of a given people in a given society, the level of revolutionary awareness of the elite and of the masses, and the degree of sovereignty of the agency in a specific zone. From this definition it is clear that there are three dimensions which are the three components of the zonal theory: environmental freedom, revolutionary awareness or consciousness, and sovereignty of agencies. These three dimensions can be discussed in each of the three zones: liberated zones, contested zones and enemy-held zones.

In the next section, I discuss the theory against the backdrop of the venues of the Pan-African gatherings before the independence of Ghana.

Zone Analysis Theory and Venues of Pan-African Gatherings before Independent Ghana

The colonial settlers set up a system of colonial administration that did not guarantee basic freedoms, especially freedoms of assembly, association, and organization. This explains why most of the Pan-African rallies took place in the western cities: London, Paris, Lisbon, Brussels, New York, Manchester. Besides the major Pan-African political organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC) created in 1912 in South Africa and the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA) created in Bamako (French Sudan now Mali) in October 1946, the attempts to organize Pan-African gatherings before the independence of Ghana were marginal.

Joseph-Casely Hayford was the main architect in 1920 of the establishment of the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA) whose goal was the building of West African unity in Accra. Delegates from the British colonies in West Africa (Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast- Ghana, Nigeria) took part in the meeting. The NCBWA suffered the contempt and derision of the colonial authorities, but nevertheless succeeded in pursuing its mission, by organizing rotating congresses in the British colonial capitals of West Africa. The NCBWA organized four Pan-African Congresses between 1920 and 1930. The third was held in Bathurst in The Gambia in December 1925. The last was held in Lagos in December 1929.¹⁹ Apart from these meetings, the major Pan-African meetings took place outside the continent of Africa.

The first acclaimed Pan-African conference took place in July 23-25, 1900, in London under the leadership of Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams in the midst of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was the champion of the Back to Africa movement in the early years of the 20th century. He was credited to have transformed Pan-Africanism into a mass movement. His gatherings called conventions mobilized tens of thousands of Black people. The headquarters of his organization was Harlem in New York.²⁰ Marcus Garvey could not visit Africa as he was prevented from doing so by colonial forces. W.E.B. Du Bois, who was at the London conference, initiated another series of Pan-African gatherings that he called Pan-African congresses. They took place in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927 and 1945; all in western cities and capitals. The first congress took place in 1919 at a historic moment and in a symbolic city for the context. It was the end of World War I and Paris was chosen because of the Treaty of Versailles about to be signed in the suburbs of the French capital. The second Pan-African Congress took place in 1921 in London, Brussels, and Paris. A third of the participants were from Africa. The Third Pan-African Congress was held in 1923 in London, Paris, and Lisbon. The Fourth Pan-African Congress of 1927 was held in New York. It was supposed to take place in the Caribbean. W.E.B. Du Bois explained why the organizers initially wanted to organize it in the Caribbean: “So far the Pan-African idea was still American rather than African, but it was growing and it expressed a real demand for an examination of the African situation and a plan of treatment, from the native point of view. With the object of moving the centre of that agitation nearer African centres of population.” ²¹ He pursued to explain how he intended to organize that meeting, and he accused colonial powers of having thwarted it: “My idea was to charter a ship and sail down the Caribbean, stopping for meetings in Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, the French Islands. Here I reckoned without my steamship lines. At first the French Line replied they could easily manage the trip;’ but eventually no accommodations could be found on any line except at the prohibitive price of fifty thousand dollars. I suspect the colonial powers spiked this plan.”²² The African centres of population namely Haiti, Cuba, the French Islands were all according to the Zone Analysis Theory non-sovereign territories and enemy-held zones.

Eventually New York was chosen because the organizers wanted to highlight the issue of racism in the United States and the growing importance of that country in the world. The congress brought together 208 delegates from 22 American states and 10 foreign countries. Africa, however, was poorly represented with delegates from the Gold Coast (Ghana), Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria.²³ The small number of African delegates was partly due to travel restrictions imposed by the British and French colonial powers on those who expressed interest in attending the congress. The travel restrictions prevented a massive turnout of African delegates. Most of the Black American delegates were women. As at previous Pan-African congresses, participants discussed the status and conditions of Black people across the world.

The Great Depression of 1929 and the military imperatives generated by WWII led to the suspension of Pan-African meetings for a period of eighteen years.²⁴ Under the leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois, Pan-Africanists sought to organize the fifth Pan-African Congress in Tunis, as they wanted that Pan-African gathering to be « geographically African. » ²⁵ The French colonial power, which had Tunisia as a colony, would only allow that Pan-African meeting to take place in Marseilles, another French city. The fifth Pan-African congress finally took place in Manchester from October 15 to 21, 1945. W.E.B. Dubois was appointed chairperson of the gathering whose main organizer was Trinidadian George Padmore aided by Kwame Nkrumah.

The Zone Analysis Theory, Ghana Independence, and the Significance of the All-African People’s Conference

The systems of domination such as colonialism, segregation, and apartheid were repeatedly scorned at the United Nations created in the aftermath of WWII.²⁶ As a result of his resounding victory in 1951, while in prison, Kwame Nkrumah was released from prison and formed a government in which were four British and seven Africans.²⁷ The leader of the newly independent country organized in 1953 a Pan-African conference in Kumasi (Gold Coast). The gathering launched the idea of forming an independent West African Federal State.

The meeting could not claim to be representative of the African masses given the non-participation of leading figures in the fight for the decolonization of Africa. Nkrumah intended to organize another Pan-African conference in 1954. That one could not take place. It was not until the independence of Ghana that major Pan-African conferences were held on the African continent, particularly in Accra (Ghana). ²⁸Ghana gained its independence on March 6, 1957 as the first Sub-Saharan African country to be free and the first Pan-African liberated zone as envisioned by the Manchester Congress. The correlation between the independence of Ghana and that of the African continent was beautifully illustrated by Kwame Nkrumah himself during his midnight speech on March 6, 1957: « The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up to the total liberation of the African continent. »²⁹

These remarks articulated a Pan-African doctrine. Ghana became a magnet and a safe haven for African nationalists and freedom fighters seeking refuge, guidance, and assistance. Ghana also became a coordinating centre for Africa’s decolonization and unity. Its leader, Kwame Nkrumah, took upon himself to bring together African leaders, African nationalists and the representatives of African masses fighting for freedom to accelerate the pace of decolonization.

The Conference of Independent African States brought together independent African states such as Ethiopia, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Liberia, and of course Ghana. The goal was to coordinate efforts and strategies for the decolonization of the continent of Africa.³⁰ The last words “Hands off Africa! Africa must be Free!” of Kwame Nkrumah’s inaugural speech during the Conference of Independent African States became the slogan of the All-African People’s Conference, coordinated by George Padmore, who was assisted by a preparatory committee.

After the Conference of Independent African States, Kwame Nkrumah visited the leaders of the countries who participated in the meeting in their respective countries. This helped strengthen physical contacts as a practical means of unifying African countries. In a context of bubbling ideas and possibilities for action, mobility among Africans has increased. Nkrumah had thus set the tone.³¹

Some other Pan-African gatherings took place in 1958 respectively in Tanganyika (September), Cotonou (July). The meeting in Tanganyika saw the creation of the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East and Central Africa (PAFMECA). Cotonou gave birth to a Pan-African party in favour of independence, the Parti of Regroupement Panafricain (PRA). Even though important, they could not be compared in magnitude, symbolism, and impact to the All-African Peoples Conference of December 1958 in Accra, which was a consequential event.

I will spotlight now how the All-African People Conference of 1958 used the three dimensions of the Zone Analysis Theory, environmental freedom, revolutionary awareness of the freedom fighters, and sovereignty of agency to promote Pan Africanism and freedom in Africa. Under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention of People’s Party, the masses namely the women, the youth, the trade unionists, the farmers had been awakened. Several organizations and structures were created to be the channels of the struggle and sentinels of the revolution and to contribute to the ideals of freedom and unity across the continent: the National Council of Ghana Women (NCGW), the Young Pioneers, the Ghana Trade Union Council (G-TUC) and the Ghana Farmer’s Council.

To carry out the actual and practical organization of the Pan-African gatherings in Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah created two specific sovereign agencies: the Office of the Advisor to the Prime Minister for African Affairs and the Centre for African Affairs. The first had the essential objective of working for the liberation and unity of Africa. It functioned as an investigative body, a propaganda platform, and a centre that allowed for the exchange of ideas with African nationalist leaders. This institution provided financial and logistical support to liberation movements in Africa and facilitated the integration into Ghana of the many political exilesto whom it provided logistical support. George Padmore was in charge of the Office of the Advisor to the Prime Minister until his death in 1959. He was the main architect of the All-African People Conference. The second tool, the Centre for African Affairs, was intended to be a reception centre for Pan-African meetings and to be an ideological training centre for African nationalists. Hundreds of them crossed paths there, received their ideological training and learned from each other.³²

Hundreds of African nationalists and international observers and partners of Africa gathered and discussed a variety of topics, namely the adequate methodology to achieve independence and notions such as African Personality. The gathering was a revolutionary landmark gathering. The revolutionary significance of the All African Peoples Conference lies in the following: the geographical relocation of the Pan-African Conferences, the naming of the new series of Pan-African gatherings, the change in leadership of the Pan-African movement, the redefinition of the concepts of the African Personality and Pan-Africanism, and in the immediate impactful reverberations and repercussions of the gathering.

The Pan-African gatherings were now held in Africa. They took the name “All-African People’s Conference” instead of congresses or conventions to mark a new cycle of the Pan-African gatherings.³³African leaders were now the leaders of the Pan-African movement rather than people from the Americas. The notions of African Personality (as articulated since the 19th century by Edward Blyden) and Pan-Africanism now transcended the idea of Black identity. They now reflected the multiracial identity of Africa.³⁴ Kwame Nkrumah would therefore claim: In 1958, Pan-Africanism had moved to the African continent, where it really belonged.’³⁵

The Accra calls for independence spread like wildfires across the entire continent of Africa from north to south from east to west, across races, borders, and ideologies.³⁶ Consequently, in 1960, 17 African countries became independent, including the colonies of France in black Africa. Two other iterations of the All-African People’s Conference took place respectively in Tunis (1960) and Cairo (1961). In hindsight, Kwame Nkrumah affirmed that three historical events have contributed to increasing the urge in Africans to be free: The Conference of the Independent African States, which took place from April 15-22, 1958, the All-African People Conference which took place from December 8-13, 1958 and the All-African People’s Conference of 1961 in Cairo.

Conclusion

In this research I have shed light on the significance of the 1958 All-African People Conference that contributed to the expansion of Pan-Africanism which thus reached new heights. A sovereign state, Ghana, conscious of its mission as a liberated zone, led by a vanguard political elite supported by awakened masses created agencies to sustain its freedom and to support others to gain theirs. The primary agencies, besides the Convention of the People’s Party (CPP) were the Office of the Advisor to the Prime Minister for African Affairs and the Centre for African Affairs. Thanks to these agencies which were totally sovereign, Ghana embarked on its mission to free Africa and build its unity. Ghana supported the liberation movements on the African continent and devised a plan for the unification of the continent.

To highlight the importance of a liberated zone in the struggle for freedom, I have demonstrated that the Pan-African Conference under Henry Sylvester Williams, the Pan-African Congresses under W.E.B Dubois, the Pan-African Conventions under Marcus Garvey all took place in European cities. Even some of the Pan-African gatherings organized in western cities suffered from the interference of western powers which sought to either thwart these meetings or to reduce their success by imposing visa restrictions on the delegates.

I also briefly compared the 1958 conference and that of 1953 organized in Kumasi when Ghana was not yet a liberated zone but a contested zone and when most of Africa was still full of enemy-held zones. I have conducted the discussion through the lens of a theory, that of the Zone Analysis Theory. Its foundational pillars were put forth by Kwame Nkrumah himself. Its theoretical articulation was done by Zizwe Poe. I have in this research contributed to that theory formulation by providing a comprehensive definition and its categorization while spotlighting the significance of the All-African People’s Conference in the history of Africa and its people. The zonal analysis can better explain the organization of different types of Pan-African gatherings, those of union leaders, political leaders, women, youth, and those of writers and intellectuals, thus making Ghana live up to its mission of a true liberated zone. The 1958 All-African People’s Conference was a great success because it was organized in a liberated area that was an independent Ghana. Today the elites and the masses of Africa are engaged in another golden age of Pan-Africanism

characterized by the quest for economic sovereignty. Continuing analysis is needed to measure the level of freedom and the state of art of the current revolutionary struggle.

Dr. Gnaka Lagoke is Associate Professor of History and Pan-Africana Studies at Lincoln University (PA) and author of Laurent Gbagbo’s Trial and the Indictment of the International Criminal Court: A Pan-African Victory and Le Panafricanisme d’Hier à Demain et la Philosophie Ubuntu. Email: [email protected]

Endnotes

¹George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1971), 156.

²Kwame Nkrumah, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare: A Guide to the Armed Phase of the African Revolution (London: Panaf Books, 1968), 44.

³Zizwe Poe, “Reflecting on Pan-African Liberated Zones: Designing a Dynamic Nkrumahist Evaluation”, Conference pronounced at the 24^th Cheikh Anta Diop Annual Conference in Philadelphia, October 10-12, 2012.

⁴Kevin Shillington, History of Africa, Third Edition (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 314.

⁵Zizwe Poe, Contribution of Kwame Nkrumah to Pan-Africanism, 67.

⁶Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 112.

⁷Kwame Nkrumah, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, 44.

⁸Kwame Nkrumah, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, 44.

⁹Kwame Nkrumah, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, 45.

¹⁰Kwame Nkrumah, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, 46.

¹¹Kwame Nkrumah, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, 47.

¹²Zizwe Poe, Contribution of Kwame Nkrumah to Pan-Africanism, 3.

¹³Zizwe Poe, Contribution of Kwame Nkrumah to Pan-Africanism, 25.

¹⁴Zizwe Poe, Contribution of Kwame Nkrumah to Pan-Africanism, 162.

¹⁵Zizwe Poe, Contribution of Kwame Nkrumah to Pan-Africanism, 66.

¹⁶Zizwe Poe, Contribution of Kwame Nkrumah to Pan-Africanism, 162.

¹⁷Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan-Africanism (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 126.

¹⁸Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan-Africanism, 124.

¹⁹Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan-Africanism, 47.

²⁰Amzat Boukari-Yabara, Africa Unite (Paris: La Decouverte, 2014), 71.

²¹W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 242.

²²W.E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa, 242.

²³W.E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa, 242-243.

²⁴W.E. B., The World and Africa, 243.

²⁵W.E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa, 243.

²⁶Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan-Africanism, 126-129.

²⁷Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, 139.

²⁸Marika Sherwood, “Pan-African Conferences, 1900-1953: What Did “Pan-Africanism” Mean” in The Journal of Pan African Studies, Vol. 4, No 10 (January 2012); p. 116-118.^XXX

²⁹Ama Biney, The Political and Social Thought of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3.

³⁰Zizwe Poe, Kwame Nkrumah’s Contribution to Pan-Africanism, 109.

³¹Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan-Africanism, 127.

³²Matteo Grilli, Nkrumaism and African Nationalism: Ghana’s Pan-African Foreign Policy in the Age of Decolonization (Cham : Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 15-16.

³³Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan-Africanism, 130.

³⁴Lagoke, Gnaka, Le Panafricanisme d’Hier à Demain et la Philosophie Ubuntu (Paris: Editions de l’Onde, 2025), 129-130.

³⁵Kwame Nkrumah, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, 31.

³⁶Philippe Decraene, “L’Afrique noire tout entière fait écho aux thèmes panafricains exaltés à Accra”, https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1959/02/DECRAENE/22920

³⁷Kwame Nkrumah, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, 30-31.