Sending individual emails via automation

Nancy Heater

Hello Smartsheet Community!

We are running in to an issue when we have an automation set up to send out notifications. If the notifications are going to the same email address for more than one row, it groups them togeher, even when we use a placeholder in the subject line such as {{Client_ID}}.

I have tested this with the automation running on only a couple of emails and running on 10 or more, and it groups any going to the same email address, regardless of how many are being processed. We typically have the automation set up to run “when triggered”, by a box being checked and/or a cell being populated.

Any suggestions on how we can prevent this from happening would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Jeff Reisman

@Nancy Heater It's grouping them into a single email and dropping the placeholders even when there are fewer than 7 going to the same recipient?

Is your automation set to just send the message only, or is it set to send the sheet link and all or some of the fields? According to this article - when using the Message only alert type, any simultaneously triggered rows will be combined into a single notification.

Jeff Reisman

@Nancy Heater For the sake of efficiency/capacity, Smartsheet will always try to group notification emails. If you use placeholder values in the email subject or body which are unique to each row, and if there are 6 or fewer notifications going to the same recipient, Smartsheet should separate them out into individual emails. However, once you hit 7 notifications to the same recipient, Smartsheet drops the unique placeholder values from the message and groups them all. (I think it will still include placeholder values that are common to all the rows, but don't quote me on that!)

The system also waits about 60 seconds after an alert is triggered, looking for any other rows that get triggered near the same time, so that it can group them if possible.

Nancy Heater

@Jeff Reisman - Thanks for the info.

The issue we're experiencing is that even with the placeholder in the subject line (that is unique to each row), it is still grouping them together when the automation sends the emails. This is causing things to get lost in emails, when users are looking in subject lines for specific information, which in our case, is the Placeholder info we're using.

Jeff Reisman

@Nancy Heater It's grouping them into a single email and dropping the placeholders even when there are fewer than 7 going to the same recipient?

Is your automation set to just send the message only, or is it set to send the sheet link and all or some of the fields? According to this article - when using the Message only alert type, any simultaneously triggered rows will be combined into a single notification.

Nancy Heater

@Jeff Reisman - We were sending a "message only"! I adjusted the automation to include the client number and address fields and it sent them as individual emails. Thank you!