About the Salesforce ‘Password Reset Loop’

Salesforce is big. Even as a qualified administrator I feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface of all the nuances that impact a day in the life of… So this blog is a collection of all the little things that I learn and relearn on a daily basis.

So, here’s the thing, if a User has never set their password and then uses the ‘Forgot Your Password?’ link they get stuck in a loop of password reset emails and the only way to break out of this is for an Administrator to manually trigger a Password Reset on the User:

This is not a major problem for ad-hoc instances but it can prove to be very problematic for those managing Digital Experiences. Imagine having X hundreds of users register on your portal every month and a portion of those users getting into a password loop situation because they didn’t set their password straight away. Aside from the horrible user experience, you could be looking a hundreds of password resets every month.

Is there a manageable workaround for this? Well, there is the ‘Last Password Change or Reset’ date field on the User record. If there is no date set then the field states ‘Unknown’, meaning that no password has ever been set for that User. In an ideal world we could pull this field through on the User list view, filter for all blank records and then select the ‘Action’ button highlighted above to select all Users in the list and perform a mass ‘Reset Password(s)’ action.

However, this would be too easy and for reasons that are not yet obvious to me, that field is not available in the UI. It can only be accessed programatically via Apex, API or possibly Flow. I’m not a Developer, that would be a different blog. So how do we solve this as Admins? Well, watch this space and i’ll see if I can build a Flow to automate a password reset.

In the meantime, please vote for the Idea raised in the link above and here.