Should new Scheduled Reminders (based on Activity Type = Email) send out to Emails created in the past?

Question

Steps:

Created a Scheduled Reminder (SR) for Entity = Activity Type = Email Status = Completed When = 1 hour after Activity Date Time Recipients = Activity Assignees

When this was saved I created an email activity for myself. And then ran the scheduled job of ‘Send Scheduled Reminders’.

In addition to an SR going out for the new email activity, my Contact record had two completed email activities from the day before the creation of the scheduled reminder (and hence well beyond the "1 hour").

The result of running the scheduled job was an scheduled reminder sent for each of the two email activities from the day before. As well as one for the new email activity one hour after the activity date time.

Is the sending of scheduled reminders for historical activities expected behaviour? if not, are there steps via UI we should be taking to avoid this happening (other than devious ones of creating new Activity Types etc) or is this a bug that needs fixing.

My recollection is we have hit other nasty surprises of SRs going out to things that were way past, such as old Events.

Answer 1

I've run into this issue before -- setup a scheduled reminder to follow up after events, and had it sent for all past events.

Personally I think this is a bug, and that we should define a window of time that the reminder is restricted to, in order to limit how far into the past it processes records.