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I am using the %%view_email_url%% personalization string in all my emails to provide the subscriber with an alternate view that is platform-independent. These links are going dead, increasingly over the past few weeks, only days or minutes after the initial send occurred, even though the same URL was functioning a moment earlier. This was never a problem a few months ago. My "URL Expiration" setting, under Admin, has always been set to 730 days.

Instead of the email message, the subscriber sees a blank white page with the text: "The system is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please try again later." But the situation is permanent, not temporary. Simultaneously another email's %%view_email_url%% link works successfully, proving that "the system" is not unavailable.

As my only hunch, could this possibly be caused by some change to the subscriber's record in the data extension that was used to target them? Or not? Our data extensions are updated or overwritten on an hourly basis -- although any given subscriber would never disappear; just their attributes could change.

The criticality of this functionality relates to its usage here in a customer service context, where we frequently need to see what the customer saw.

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Reference this previous post 'VAWP links break for Salesforce Send Emails'

to Ensure you VAWP link doesn't break with you process you will need to use a send log and use ampscript to look up these values. Reference this page 'Display Send-Time Content Contextually'

AMPscript allows you to pull the send-time content from the send logging data extension for use in your chosen context.

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Your idea is correct. %%view_email_url%% are tied to data in sendable Data Extension used to deploy the email. If data in it changes, so does the web version of email. Data Extension Rows carry a unique attribute that marks the row ID (I think it's called _ObjectID but I'm not 100% sure). How overwrite process works is it first deletes all the data in table and then repopulate it. Even if for particular subscriber data didn't change and is added with same attributes, new record is created with new row ID and old one is deleted. These Row IDs are tied to web version of email. In your case web version functionality looks for data to display on the page for deleted row ID and finds none - therefore displaying an error.

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    _CustomObjectID is what is used - to get around this issue, you can use Send Logging and _MessageContext ampscript to display this correctly when using the VAWP link. developer.salesforce.com/docs/…
    – Jeremy
    Commented Jul 19, 2019 at 13:10

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