Approval Requests Automatically Triggering on Email Click – Still Looking for a Solution

Vítor Hasegawa

Hi everyone,

I’ve been struggling with a strange issue related to Smartsheet approval requests and haven’t been able to find a solution. I’ve posted about this in other forums but haven’t received any responses yet, so I’m trying here as well — maybe someone has seen this before or can point me in the right direction.

The issue:
When I receive an approval request via Gmail and click the “Open Request” button in the email, the request is immediately marked as “Refused”, even though I haven’t interacted with the approval page at all.

A browser tab opens with the message:

“This link has already been used or has been cancelled.”

But I haven’t clicked “Approve” or “Decline” — it seems the response is being auto-submitted as soon as I click the email button.

What I’ve tried so far:

• Checked my email scanning/security settings.
• Disabled Gmail’s Enhanced Malware and Phishing Protection.
• Discovered that if I copy and paste the approval link into a browser manually, everything works as expected — I can interact with the request without any automatic submission.

This leads me to believe some sort of link scanning or automation in Gmail is causing the premature action.

Has anyone else run into this? I’d really appreciate any tips, workarounds, or insight — still trying to get to the bottom of it.

Thanks in advance!

kowal

hi @Vítor Hasegawa,

I had exactly the same issue in my previous company where the gmail was automatically declining smartsheet because it was so setup by our IT Department. IT department just to protect the company from phishing etc. automatically setsup that in emails with buttons the decline is automatically chosen.

All you need to do is to go to your IT department and tell them to whitelist the smartsheet domain from this security setup.

It solved the problem for me.