How To Manage Expired Links In Sfmc Engagement

What happens to a link in your email after it expires? Did you even know that links in emails do expire?

These questions are front of mind for a lot of SFMC Engagement users after… what are we calling it? The Linkpocalypse? Expiregate? If you have a punny idea for the name, please comment!

On January 23, 2026, Salesforce sent an email announcing that they had upgraded the security of all of their links with enhanced encryption — and along the way, they expired all links in all emails sent prior to January 21, 2026.

Yes, you read that right — all links in all emails sent prior to January 21, 2026 are now expired.

Including unsubscribe links, by the way.

To understand the impact, let’s look at how links in emails actually work, and what we can do for damage control.

How Links Work

When you’re building an email, you define the URL where you want each CTA and other clickable elements to link to. When you send that email, SFMC encrypts your original link and replaces it with its own. If you look at a link in your inbox (hover on a computer, or long-press on a phone), you’ll see that it’s in a different format than what you originally added:

https://click.[subdomain].[domain].com?qs=[reallylongencryptedstring]

That subdomain.domain is likely something you defined while implementing SFMC.

When a subscriber clicks/taps your CTA, a few things happen:

• This SFMC-generated “click.___” URL hits SFMC’s servers
• SFMC decrypts the encrypted link to know which CTA in which email email was clicked by which subscriber, and records it all for reporting
• SFMC looks up the original URL you specified and redirects there
• The subscriber lands on your original URL, and it happens so quickly they probably never even noticed the URL changing during the redirect

Essentially, the SFMC URL redirects to your URL, and that redirect powers how click tracking works.

Until…

Expired Link Handling

Eventually, links expire — which makes sense, because SFMC doesn’t want to store their encrypted URL and your original URL as a reference forever. You have direct control over how long SFMC keeps links active before expiring them — a minimum of 60 days and a maximum of 2 years.

There are two ways to get to this setting:

1. Email Studio > Admin > Send Management > URL Expiration
2. Setup > Platform Tools > Feature Settings > Email Studio > URL Expiration

What you’ll notice is that there is also an option to define where you want expired links to go. If you keep the System Default URL selected, it will go to a blank white page (much like a 404) with this generic message:

This link has expired. Please contact the sender of the email for more information.

Not only is that unhelpful, it’s not remotely compliant for someone who just clicked an unsubscribe link.

Alternatively, if you select the Custom Defined URL, you can decide where you want it to go. These settings are configurable for each business unit, so you can define different expired link URLs for each business unit if you prefer.

Isn’t It Too Late?

Now that SFMC expired all of our links, isn’t it too late to do anything about it? Or will changing the Custom Defined URL work retroactively?

I wasn’t sure, so I tested it.

I pasted my company’s home page, clicked Save, went to an old email in my inbox, held my breath, clicked a link, and…

…was disappointed. I landed on the generic expiration page.

So I tried again. And again. About 15 times over the next 5 minutes, and eventually, IT WORKED. A link in an old email redirected to the new page I defined.

Here’s what I conclude:

• When someone clicks an expired link, SFMC checks what URL is currently defined, not at the time the email was sent.
  • And in retrospect, that makes sense — if the original point of expiring links was to alleviate long-term link-maps-to-link storage, then storing the expiration link URL long-term completely defeats the purpose.
• However that check works, it must be cached in some way, because it takes a few minutes for the change to take effect.

So, we’ve proven that A) you can change where your expired links go, and B) it applies retroactively. Where should you send your expired links?

Considerations

There are a lot of directions you can go with this. Following is an outline of thought starters and how I approached it for my own company, Polaris.

First, you should think about compliance.

• How important is capturing unsubscribes?
  • We wanted to stay compliant with USA’s CAN-SPAM and Canada’s CASL, so a path to unsubscribe was a top priority for me.
• Do you have any other content with legal requirements or other sensitivities?
  • We have one business unit that sends notifications about product recalls — this is a very sensitive topic and consumer safety is our #1 priority, so we wanted to ensure anyone clicking a product recall email got to a web page where they could quickly, easily get all the information they need.

Second, you should think about user experience.

• What types of emails do you send, and what types of CTAs do you include? Do you know what CTAs are most clicked a period of time after the send?
  • We wanted to prioritize top help CTAs (like contacting a dealership or customer service), and we also know that a particular CTA that gets a lot of repeat clicks over time is online order tracking, so we wanted to prioritize that as well.
• Are all the top actions/CTAs represented on your company’s home page? If so, maybe you can simply set your website’s home page as your expiration page. Or, do you have more than one home page? In that case, you may need to consider something custom.
  • For Polaris, we send emails from about a dozen brands to USA and Canada, so there was no one page on our website that represented all of those destinations.
• What’s your tone? Not getting to where you were expecting when clicking an email can be frustrating, so is there an opportunity to inject some humor?
  • One of our early drafts had a photo of some hunters standing next to an off road vehicle (one of our top products), looking out over a hillside with binoculars, accompanied by the tagline “Now Where Did That Link Go?” We thought it was funny but were overridden by humorless marketing directors. Alas.

My Solution

Ultimately, I determined that the only way to represent all of our brands and multiple CTAs, and to incorporate an unsubscribe option, was to create a custom landing page with CloudPages. I’m not a web developer and not much more than a hack at Bootstrap, so it’s not elegant. But it’s not bad for turning around in less than a business day, and it does the job of catching people coming from a wide range of content and providing links to a lot of different destinations.

If you’re curious: https://cloud.hello.polaris.com/expired-email-link

I was also able to incorporate two pieces of functionality that I felt were important.

1. The country picker at the top is actually a form element that refreshes the page with an added URL parameter. The AMPscript on the page reads the culture code from that URL parameter and adjusts all of the page’s links, which are dynamic — so if United States is selected, all links go to our /en-us/ (English USA) site, or if Canada is selected, all links go to our /en-ca/ (English Canada) site.
2. The unsubscribe link at the bottom links to another CloudPage, my custom unsubscribe page. Typically, a link from one of our emails passes information about the subscriber, the email, the brand, and the publication list, and when they click an Unsubscribe button to confirm, it processes the unsubscribe. In this case, I have none of that info, so I created a fallback version that engages if there is no information passed — it just asks for an email address, which is then logged to a data extension for me to follow up later. Do I love that I need to go search that person manually in All Subscribers and process the unsubscribes. No. But hey, it’s technically compliant if I do it within 10 days.

What’s Your Solution?

I hope you found this helpful. If you have other ideas/considerations for a great user experience when clicking an expired link — well, “great” is optimistic, let’s settle for “less bad” — I’d love to hear about it in the comments.